Marketing, AI & Startup Grit ft. Khalid Farid | Behind Marketing Lines | Episode 72

In this episode of Behind Marketing Lines, our host Zeeshan sits down with Khalid Farid, CEO and Co Founder of AdKraft AI and former marketing leader at Procter and Gamble. His journey started with tutoring neighbours and working while studying, before a rejected marketing application sent him to LUMS for an MBA, and then P&G came calling, changing the direction of his professional life. Years later, he shares what he has learned about running a startup, driving AI powered marketing and staying true to the fundamentals in an industry that never stops evolving. Khalid shares how his P&G background shaped AdKraft AI, why passion beats intuition almost every time, and what marketers risk producing when they let AI do too much of the work. Inside this episode: • The Movie of His Life: The Long Game, opening on a handshake after a long career at one of the world's top companies • The Origin Story: From tutoring neighbours and studying computer science to LUMS, P&G and a two decade marketing career • The Rejection That Redirected Him: Being turned away from a bank marketing role for lacking the background • Building AdKraft AI: Teaching a system what good marketing looks like using Fortune 500 thinking and more than 10,000 ads • The Hard Lesson: Believing in yourself, because if you don't, nobody else will • The AI Debate: Why AI will replace PowerPoint before marketers and make good marketers faster and smarter • His AI Boundaries: Using AI to remove emotion from financial sheets, but never for emotional creative concepts or human situations • The Tool He Relies On: AdKraft AI, which distils marketing thinking into one go to choice • The Marketing Cliche He Would Challenge: Everybody wants disruptive communication, until they are shown something truly disruptive • The Campaign That Fascinated Him: Surf Excel's Dirt Is Good, also known as Daag To Achay Hotay Hain, a rare marriage of functional and emotional • The Awkward Moment: Buying a missing SKU from the store next door before a senior management visit, only for his boss to walk in and buy it • The Billboard Message: Don't Stop Til You Get Enough • His Superpower Pick: Consumer representation, because if marketers don't do it, nobody else does • Rapid Fire: Brand over performance, data over creativity, human intuition over AI, TV ads over TikTok reels and tea over coffee • The Habit That Keeps Him Sharp: Padel, 90 minutes of pure disconnection • His Secret Passion: Padel, the one thing he cannot live without • Advice to Future Marketers: Build on what is proven to work, and start and end with the consumer • His Three Words: Believe in yourself A conversation about the journey from P&G to startup founder, the importance of grit and honesty, and why the future belongs to marketers who embrace AI without losing the consumer, and the human, at the heart of every campaign.