Inside AdLift-Liqvd Asia’s high-stakes bet on a unified digital agency model

When Liqvd Asia acquired performance marketing agency AdLift earlier this year, the industry reacted with a mix of curiosity and caution. India’s digital agency landscape, fragmented, crowded, and increasingly shaped by AI disruptions, has long demanded deeper integration between creative and performance capabilities. But few expected two large, culturally different organisations to stitch themselves together with the right speed and clarity.

Inside AdLift’s office, however, Prashant Puri sounds almost surprised at how quickly things have moved. “The first 90 days were more about a lot of listening and learning than announcing,” he recalls. “We ran a lot of cross-agency squads across multiple clients, worked on workshops, cultural integration and that really started to click.”

Puri, who co-founded AdLift and continues to lead the performance engine of the merged entity, describes the process as more fluid than formulaic. “AdLift brings a very performance-obsessed data mindset and Liqvd brings deep storytelling and brand craft,” he says. “So when both these worlds essentially sit on client briefing calls, the thick culture of integrating and collaborating across both the agencies emerges almost organically.”

There is no rhetoric about “two companies”; no corporate distancing. “There’s not two agencies separately, but it’s basically one team owning the full funnel,” Puri insists. 

What began as a strategic acquisition has quickly turned into a structural shift, one designed not for optics or headlines, but for the increasingly complex demands of modern marketers.

Why this merger, and why now?

Puri attributes the deal to a clear market need; a gap that neither pure-play creative agencies nor specialist performance firms could address independently. “The challenge that we saw the market facing was that there was not one-stop shop for both pure play performance as well as pure play creative,” he notes. “These were standalone services.”

With AI fundamentally reshaping both content and media, that fragmentation was starting to show its limits. “Brands don’t want short-term spikes. Brands essentially want longer-term ROI, which is where you need both performance expertise as well as creative expertise.”

The ambition, then, is not just to scale, but to transform how digital mandates are serviced. For large advertisers wrestling with full-funnel journeys, from Google Search to generative AI discovery models, this union promises a more accountable, cohesive model. “AdLift’s deep expertise in SEO, performance media, and now AI measurement and AEO, coupled with Liqvd’s strong credentials on content and storytelling, both come together,” Puri says. “That is essentially what we are seeing for a lot of our current partners.”

In a sector cluttered with thousands of agencies, the timing was deliberate. “I was looking at a number and there are an estimated 10 to 15,000 digital agencies in India alone,” Puri says, nearly amused at the sheer volume. “Out of those, maybe 1,000 would be MSMEs. Out of those 1,000, I’m not seeing so many integrations. These are sort of one-offs.”

For him, this was neither a defensive consolidation nor a trend-following exercise. “I won’t say offensive or defensive,” he explains. “I just feel that there was a need of the hour for both Liqvd and AdLift to come together because there was a gap in the market… and we’ve actually seen in the last six months how effectively we filled it.”

Inside the combined engine

While many integrations in India stop at a press release, this one appears to have managerial teeth. Puri says the biggest shift is simply better quality assurance across the entire digital funnel. “Our closure rate is probably better than it was before the acquisition,” he notes. “Now we go in being sort of a 10 on 10 across each four parameters of digital marketing. All strength, all guns blazing.”

This is more than just a capability statement, it’s a structural reorganisation. “Having one single team accountable” is, he says, what’s driving new wins. In the last five months alone, the combined entity has onboarded “about 35 new clients, which is massive… on an average, we have onboarded two a week.”

But Puri doesn’t credit momentum to aggressive pitching alone. Existing clients remain central. “If you keep losing clients and new clients keep coming in then you’re evening out and there is no growth,” he says. “Making sure we are delivering value to existing clients is critical… and then at the same level for new clients.”

Crucially, the profile of clients they court hasn’t narrowed to a single vertical. “We are pretty much vertical agnostic,” he says, listing sectors as diverse as travel, insurance, brokerage, clothing, fintech and D2C. Growth, he emphasises, is opportunity-based. “Where we can add more value to the prospective client… then we will onboard that client.”

The idea of an “ideal client”, he adds, is not defined by sector size but by mindset. “The ideal client would be the one you collaborate really well with,” he says. “They also have skin in the game… having that attitude across both teams becomes critical.” Healthy back-and-forth, transparency, and mutual accountability form the basis of the relationship.

A joint leadership model without silos

One of the more unusual aspects of the integration is its leadership structure. Rather than merging teams under a single figurehead, AdLift and Liqvd Asia continue to be led jointly by Puri and the Liqvd leadership.

“The joint leadership framework essentially involves both CEOs working very closely together and not working in silos,” Puri explains. “If a client asks, who do I talk to? We can easily address that.”

Weekly war rooms, shared resourcing and integrated planning systems mean that no client feels the friction of two agencies stitched together after the fact. “The client does not need to go through multiple hoops just because two companies came together,” he says.

If anything, the structure seems designed not to smooth hierarchy, but to remove it entirely from the client-facing experience.

International ambitions and the US opportunity

AdLift’s US footprint, long a differentiator in the Indian performance marketing landscape, now plays a more central strategic role. “International expansion is always critical for us,” Puri says. “A large share of our revenues come from our US clients.”

The organisation regularly participates in global speaking circuits, covering SEO, AEO and performance marketing, which in turn fuels new business. But for the first time, Puri is signalling the export of creative as well. “We’re also looking at Liqvd’s world-class creative capability and then taking that to the US,” he says, eyeing 2026 as a pivotal year.

If successful, this would shift the organisation from a performance-led exporter to a full-stack digital partner for global brands.

AI as the real differentiator

Perhaps the most compelling development inside the combined entity is its early investment in AI-led organic growth tools. For a company built on SEO leadership, Puri sees generative search as the next foundational shift.

“As a performance agency, organic growth and SEO growth has always been the focus and the foundation,” he says. “SEO has always been the highest delivering ROI channel… and the toughest for any agency to deliver.”

Their approach has always relied on staying ahead of the curve. In 2015–16, AdLift built a content syndication platform powering organic growth across a 40,000–45,000 publisher network. In 2024-25, they doubled down on AEO—Answer Engine Optimisation, optimising for models like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.

But this year marks the biggest leap yet: Tesseract, AdLift’s proprietary LLM tracking platform.

“We are the only Indian agency to have launched its own large language model tracking tool,” Puri says. “Tesseract has been built with APIs across Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT… today we have about 180 brands already using this platform.”

In an ecosystem where brands are eager to understand their presence in generative search flows, Tesseract is positioned as both diagnostic and strategic. “Any brand can log in and see how they are showing up… and what they can do to start showing up if they’re not.”

The traction has been swift. “We’ve seen amazing traction in the last four or five months,” Puri notes. “Growth looks tremendous for this tool.”

When asked whether this early lead is shaping competitive advantage, Puri doesn’t demur. “That’s correct,” he says plainly.

A unified future

While agency integrations in India frequently culminate in mere structural announcements, the merger between AdLift and Liqvd Asia aims to adopt a comprehensively consolidated operational model. The newly formed entity predicates its positioning on the belief that clients increasingly favour a singular partner capable of managing creative services, performance marketing, and nascent AI-driven discovery channels.

Puri maintains that the integration has addressed a clear gap in service delivery. “We’re seeing how effectively we’ve filled it,” he said, adding that the aim is to operate as “one team, owning the full funnel.”

As digital mandates expand to include content, media, and generative search environments, the merged organisation is preparing to compete in an environment where end-to-end accountability may play a larger