Ashish Bhasin trashes retirement rumours

Ashish Bhasin, CEO APAC and Chairman India, dentsu international, has trashed retirement rumours after a business news portal carried a report on recent top-level exits from the group. Bhasin has called the news “baseless, unverified, wrong, and untrue”. 

Taking to Twitter to clarify, Bhasin said, “Thank you, moneycontrol.com for planning a premature retirement for me. Based upon your planning my retirement, I ordered a new beer glass, a new swimsuit and planned lovely holidays. Now both my boss and my wife, unfortunately, don’t agree with you.”  

“Don’t apologise for baseless, unverified, wrong, and untrue reporting. That’s not expected from some journalists though others with ethics would probably do so. Not sure where you stand on this. Just reimburse the swimsuit charges for now,” mentioned Bhasin. 

The report in moneycontrol.com claimed, “The Indian unit of Dentsu Group Inc has been rocked by a series of senior-level exits, potentially causing more departures, and deepening turmoil at the advertising company. In the past two weeks, six senior executives have left Dentsu International India. Four of these executives ran digital entities and divisions, which contribute nearly 50% of total revenue of the Japanese advertising giant in India.”

“Senior executives at Dentsu India are approaching the heads of other networks for jobs. Panic has gripped executives at Dentsu India after a series of top-level exits from the company,” the report quoted the chief of a leading advertising network as saying.

The report talks about a slew of top-level exits from the Indian unit of the Dentsu group in thr recent past.

This week itself saw multiple departures, including CEO of Dentsu India Anand Bhakamkar, Group Managing Director of Isobar India Shamsuddin Jasani, and Co-founder and former CCO of Taproot Dentsu Agnello Dias, who has continued his association with the agency as a consultant for key brands only. Earlier, iProspect’s CEO Rubeena Singh and Head of Dentsu Performance Group Vivek Bhargava had called it quits. Gautam Mehra, CEO of Dentsu programmatic, and chief data officer of Dentsu Asia Pacific, too left.

dentsu international (previously known as Dentsu Aegis Network) in 2019 appointed Bhasin into the newly created role of CEO, Dentsu Aegis Network, APAC. Prior to that, he was designated as CEO, Dentsu Aegis Network, Greater South. 

Last year, Dentsu Aegis Network rebranded itself as Dentsu International Limited. The purpose of the rebranding was to "allow all dentsu employees to deliver on the group’s philosophy of true client-centricity through 'open teaming'—the concept of all employees realizing innovation for clients from anywhere," the company had said in a statement.