Yes Madam — Performance Creative System

Yes Madam is an at-home salon and beauty service with a pan-India footprint and app-led booking. I ran performance creative as Associate Creative Director, leading a 20+ person creative organisation across Copy, Design, Video and Production, with four functional heads.

The competitor was never Urban Company. It was the local parlour and the parlour-wali-didi: habit, familiarity and low friction. The brief was behaviour change, not awareness.

Brief from the last cycle, produce multiple assets, launch into structured tests, then measure, rank and rotate. Every cycle starts from what the last one proved rather than from a blank page.

One pattern held across spends. ASMR formats drove bookings at a materially better rate than explainers, demos or talking-head cuts. But served cold, with no context, they underperformed on reach, especially for experience-first services like spa and mani-pedi.

Explainers were the mirror image. Strong on awareness and good at teaching the mechanism, weak as a closer, unable to carry the full funnel alone.

So I stopped running them flat and sequenced them instead. Explainer first, to build context. View-completion of the explainer builds the retargeting pool. That pool then sees the ASMR cut, which is the asset built to convert. The right asset reaches the buyer at the stage where it works.

Cost per booking down. Booking conversion up. Media budget flat.

Money is always limited. The answer is rarely to spend more.

The switch was easy to state and hard to earn. She calls her parlour-wali-didi without thinking. Get her to open Yes Madam without thinking.

The Service Professional carries that. She is the face of the brand and its strongest advocate, and it is easier to believe a person than a brand, so trust in the SP is what unlocks the switch. Two routes came out of that: the Superhuman SP, equipped to solve every beauty and spa need, and the Soothing SP, whose presence assures the result every time.

The guardrails mattered as much as the routes. Shown through behaviour rather than voice-over claims. Brand integration inside the first seven to eight seconds. Mass-premium, never luxury. Her living room familiar, not a hotel suite.

My contribution ran from brief to launch. I wrote the campaign brief and set the switch objective, the SP frame and the guardrails. I briefed and oversaw the agency across two persona routes and three 20-second films. I reviewed and vetted the moodboard, scripts, tagline and CTA. I validated qualitative and quantitative signal against real viewer reaction with industry vendors. Final assets were vetted through senior-management sign-off.

A Yes Madam service line, launched 31 May 2026.

We repositioned a one-off hydrafacial into a barrier-repair regimen, to drive repeat bookings instead of single ones. Not a glorified facial. A science-backed treatment.

Three phases. Education and repositioning first, built on standardised results and common pain points. Then problem mapping across acne, dehydration, ageing and pigmentation, to drive relevance. Then proof and conversion, through outcomes, testimonials and expert proof.

Production ownership was mine end to end. I sourced and vetted the production houses and locked scope, cost and timelines. I ran the shoots, directing for performance rather than only for brand. I closed on edits, cuts and format variants for every placement.

68 assets. 4 content phases. 4 agencies plus in-house. An 11-week campaign window.

₹1.39 Cr allocated by phase, in collaboration with the media team.

20+ people across Copy, Design, Video Edit and Production, with four functional heads.

My job was the system that produced the work: the briefs, the standards, the testing structure and the people. Giving agency to the ones with intent matters here. When the editor says he knows the cut better than I do and can back it up, that is the cue to support him.