Doyens of digital: Meet the leaders who rake in the revenue

With the onset of the pandemic, Digital advertising has been on a mission to overshadow Television AdEx in India, after having surpassed Print, Radio and other mediums. We saw how Google, and Facebook overtook top Indian media firms in ad revenue in FY21. In fact, their last earnings report for FY22 showed how the two players still dominate the Digital advertising space in the country, even as other Digital media companies have begun to slowly chip their way into that share. However, the year 2022 was one that first brought optimism for Digital media with forecasts on how it is expected to grow by 30% as opposed to TV’s 14%, and then in the second part spread gloom with talks of a global slowdown, coupled with layoffs and impending recession, which were expected to shake the advertising industry and most directly the tech majors.

Here we profile the key leaders from tech companies who have contributed to the success of these digital platforms, the ones that have driven growth through the transformative sale of advertisements in various forms.

Google India

Estimated Ad Revenue: Rs 24,926.5 cr for FY22

Google supports a total of 19 Indian languages

Roma Datta Chobey
Senior Director, Digital First Businesses

Roma Datta Chobey joined Google in 2015 as the Head of Industry, Classifieds, and Gaming. She was later elevated as Group Head for Travel, BFSI, Classifieds, Gaming, Telco, and Payments. Her portfolio expanded when she was appointed as Director, Entertainment and Media. She was previously associated with HDFC bank and IDBI Bank. After spending ten years in the banking sector, Chobey stepped into a strategy role, and thereafter she joined the tech industry.


Shalini Puchalapalli
Director, Customer Solutions

Shalini joined Google in 2021, and is Director and Country Head for Google Customer Solutions where she is building the digital ecosystem for India. Prior to her current role, she was the Category Director with Amazon India and CEO for Lehar Foods Business, PepsiCo. There she turned around the business through business model transformation. Shalini is a leader with functional expertise in Sales, Finance, Supply Chain, and Human resources.

Priya Choudhary
Director, Business Solutions

Priya Choudhary joined Google in 2019 as Head of YouTube and Brand Solutions. She was elevated as Director of Business Solutions in 2021. Prior to joining Google, she worked as a key leader with Mediacom. An MBA in marketing communications from MICA, Choudhary has worked with Ogilvy & Mather, Madison World, and Mindshare in the past. She also had stints with Unilever and Kraft Heinz, prior to joining Mediacom.

Satya Raghavan
Director, Marketing Partners

Satya Raghavan joined Google in 2014, and was Director of Content Partnership, Youtube. He was elevated as Director of Marketing Partners in 2022. Raghavan is responsible for partnerships with creative and media agencies to drive digital transformation for advertisers. Before joining Google, Raghavan served in senior positions as the Head of Consumer Marketing at MSN India, Vice President of Marketing at Star India, and Vice-President at Helion Ventures.

Bhaskar Ramesh
Director, Omnichannel Businesses

Bhaskar Ramesh joined Google in 2012, and was elevated as Head of YouTube and Brand Advertising in 2017. In this current role as Director of Omnichannel Businesses (Technology, Retail, Auto, CPG, Finance and CoE Digitization), he leads Google India’s Omni channel businesses, driving the digitization of large traditional sectors making Google gateway of Omni channel commerce in India.

TANVEER S. UBEROI
Director, Agency Partnerships & Sales, Google Customer Solutions

Tanveer S. Uberoi joined Google India in 2015 as Head, Agency Partnerships & Sales, Google Customer Solutions. He was elevated as a Director in 2021, and is currently responsible for the partner ecosystem in India, which includes cross-channel media, and independent digital media agencies. Prior to joining Google India, he was working as Vice President and National Sales Head, Branded Content, for Times Network.

Meta

Estimated Ad Revenue: Rs 16,189 cr for FY22

Arun Srinivas
Director & Head of Ads Business

Arun Srinivas joined Meta in 2020, and today he leads the strategy and delivery of its India marketing solutions focused on advertisers and agencies. Prior to this, he was with cab aggregator Ola, where he was the Chief Operating Officer (COO), and Global Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Ola Mobility. Srinivas comes with 24 years of experience in senior sales and marketing roles at companies such as Ola, Unilever, and Reebok. He also did a stint at investment firm WestBridge Capital Partners, where he led the consumer vertical. Srinivas started his career with Reebok and then moved to Unilever where he spent more than 15 years across food, beverages, skincare, and personal care categories. He is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata.

There are nearly 239.65 million Facebook users in India alone, making it the leading country in terms of Facebook audience size Source: Statista

Recently, Whatsapp collaborated with Jio Mart to enable conversational e-commerce in India

There were 2,533,35,900 Instagram users in India in January 2022, which accounted for 17.7% of its entire population: NapoleanCat

Key Individual:
Archana Vohra
Director, Global Business Group, Mid Market & SMB India

Archana Vohra

Director, Small and Medium Businesses (India) 

Archana Vohra leads Meta's mandate of enabling, growing, and scaling entrepreneurs and young digital businesses in India. Passionate about unleashing the potential of small businesses, she is committed to empowering them at scale to drive socio-economic growth. Archana joined Meta in January 2019 from Amazon, where she worked as Director, Seller Enablement. Archana has nearly two-and-a-half decades of experience in creating, building, and monetizing web and mobile products across leadership roles at Meta, Amazon, NDTV Convergence and Times Internet Limited. She is also passionate about diversity initiatives and animal rights, and spends her time outside of Meta dedicated to these.

Disney+Hotstar

Estimated Ad Revenue: Rs 1,684.31 cr for FY22

Shalini Poddar
Executive Vice President, Head, Ad Sales

Shalini Poddar joined Disney+Hotstar in 2021, and is responsible for the ad sales revenue and strategy for Disney+ Hotstar. She leads a team of 140+ people across all aspects of the ad business, Business Planning; Sales; Sales Strategy, including pricing and formats; Revenue Management; Operations; Data Partnerships; Programmatic; Brand Lab; Measurement/ROI, and Customer Marketing. In her previous role at Google, she was Head of Business Development, Google Play Apps — India, South East Asia, and Australia. She had an eight-year stint at Google, having joined the company in July 2013 as Industry Manager — Telecom, Gaming, and Payments. Shalini has 17 years of experience across Consulting, Strategy, Business Development, Sales, Partnerships, and Marketing.

Spotify

Arjun Ravi Kolady
Head of Sales - India

Arjun Ravi Kolady joined Spotify India in 2019. Prior to this he was associated with Facebook, Google, and Give. At Facebook he was driving the largest vertical in India. He evangelized mobile solutions and drove incremental advertising revenue growth from a select set of partners in the online space across commerce, offline retail, airlines, OTAs, Hotels, and hyperlocal players.

Samsung Ads

Prabhvir Sahmey
Senior Director, India and Southeast Asia

Sahmey joined Samsung Ads in 2020 as Senior Director. His remit is to set up the Samsung Ads business in India & South East Asia by pioneering the arena of Connected TV. Prior to Samsung, Prabh pioneered Programmatic Advertising at Google, Search Advertising at GroupM, and E-education with Tata Interactive Systems. Over the years, Prabhvir has been identified as a domain expert for all things online, and is a go-getter, calm, and goal-oriented individual.

Amazon Ads

Estimated Advertisement Revenue: Rs 4,171.4 cr for FY22

Vijay Iyer
Director, Large Customer Ad Sales, Amazon India

Vijay Iyer joined Amazon Ads as India Head for Agency Business. He became the India Head for overall ad sales in 2019. Vijay Iyer is a Digital Media leader with extensive experience in building businesses. He has spearheaded planning and execution of key initiatives across digital advertising, social media and video with P&L ownership. He was previously associated with Komli Media, RML and AdNear.

Amazon India currently has 1.1 million sellers on its platform. It had 100 million registered users in 2022. Source: Shiprocket

Alexa answered over 4 crore requests during the Amazon Great Indian Festival 2022 to guide customers to product searches, event storefront pages, deals, games, information about products and more on the Amazon Android shopping app

During the festive sale, women entrepreneurs selling through Amazon Saheli sold 6 products every minute

Key individual

Kapil Sharma, Director, SMB Ads Business

Kapil was part of the core team that built and grew Amazon Ads in India. He is a tenured Amazonian leader with stints across multiple businesses. He currently leads the SMB Ads business, including seller ads. He has a rich and diverse experience in Advertising, Banking, Manufacturing, and Consulting. He is an alumni of IIT Madras and IIM Calcutta and was associated with RBS and GE in the past.

Flipkart Ads

Estimated Advertisement Revenue: Rs 2,083.5 cr in FY22


Sankalp Mehrotra
VP, Monetization

With over 15+ years of experience across APAC, he has a consistent record of accomplishing aggressive goals and achieving turnarounds. At Flipkart, he has orchestrated the rise of Flipkart Ads to the top three/four Digital ad platforms in India in a short time. He is responsible for overall revenue, business strategy, business development, marketing, advertiser relations, operations, hiring and representing Flipkart Ads at all external forums. An important part of his role is crafting the vision that will unlock the next wave of exponential growth. Prior to this, he was the Executive Director for South East Asia where he led growth for Affle. In his previous roles, Sankalp was part of leading media agencies (Zenith Optimedia, Cheil and DDB) managing top brands, in India, Malaysia and Singapore.

"Our major goals are to build an ads platform that ensures that both sellers/brands and consumers see the most relevant messaging. Also, from a seller/brand perspective, we want to enable solutions and advertising experiences that fulfil multiple marketing objectives - building awareness, driving consideration, inducing trials and conversions. And close the loop on all investments through full-funnel attribution and insights. Flipkart Ads is already a scaled platform that enables tens of thousands of sellers and brands to increase the velocity of their consideration and purchases. We will continue to invest behind newer opportunities on and off platform, which allow our partners to create disproportionate success for their marketing goals. The adtech market is volatile right now with changes like third-party cookie deprecation, iOS changes that empower customers to decide tracking, among other things. These will reinforce migration to a platform like ours that relies on first-party intent.” 

Flipkart witnessed the highest-ever number of concurrent users with 1.6 million users per second in its ninth edition of ‘Big Billion Days 2022’ festive sales

Truecaller Ads

Sagar Manikpure
Senior Vice President- Global Ads Business

Sagar Manikpure joined Truecaller Ads in 2022 as Vice President for Global Ads Business. He is responsible for driving the global ads business for Truecaller through the levers of product, sales, partnerships and cross-functional collaboration. Prior to this, Sagar worked with Airpush, a digital advertising solutions company for around 7 years. Before Airpush, Sagar worked with MyParichay as Vice President - Products and Adiquity / Guruji.com as Head - Business Development for around 6 months and 6 years respectively. Sagar is an engineering graduate.

Key individual

Madhuri Krishnan, Global Ad Sales Director

Paytm Ads

Sameer Kapoor
Senior Vice President- Head of Business

Responsible for overseeing all facets of Ads Business for Paytm, Kapoor drives the vision, mission and execution for Paytm Ads. With over 22 years of experience in media and marketing for offline and online platforms, Sameer has been a catalyst in building the team and revenues at Paytm Ads. Having worked across geographies and industries in various leadership roles, Sameer brings along his comprehensive expertise in working with global brands and leading digital challenges for long-term growth.

VerSe Innovation (Dailyhunt and Josh)

Sunil Kumar Mohapatra

Chief Revenue Officer, VerSe Innovation

"I have spearheaded the entire company culture, leadership focus, and cross-functional teams to prioritize Monetization as a DNA-defining, strategic goal for the company. I have also led the market expansion of Dailyhunt to international markets (starting with MENA region), and rapidly built and scaled the monetization org to capture and lead the short video space. Today, the Digital industry, especially rich content platforms need to work on creating the pull and build formats for brand storytelling. They also need to move away from performance-only deals as Digital offers a very innovative canvas for brand-building. This has been a big miss in the recent past. Moreover, content marketing can also help create memorable campaigns, build differentiated positioning, and deliver sustained brand lift. Our goal is to become the default news destination for a Billion Indians.”

InMobi

Devika Sharma
Director - Revenue and New Business Partnerships, Consumer Platform Advertising

"We expect 2023 to be a promising year. Our vision is to convert passive digital surfaces into smart surfaces by leveraging the capabilities provided by today’s mobile devices. As hyperconnected consumers spend more time on their smartphones, they need more fulfilling experiences to catch their eye in the moment. It’s time for brands to take mobile marketing into their own hands and create a new age of seamless, serendipitous discovery. This ‘one-click discovery’ that is being pioneered by brands through Lock Screen Marketing, is expected to soon become the go-to platform for connecting with consumers.”

InMobi became India’s first Unicorn in 2011

LinkedIn

Sachin Sharma
Director, Enterprise Marketing Solutions, LinkedIn

"India, like the rest of the world, navigates a period of economic uncertainty, staying agile and adaptive is key to coming out strong in this environment. At this time, our role is to support decision-makers build a marketing strategy that can weather external challenges. As per our latest research, two-thirds of B2B marketing leaders said that they will continue investing in long-term brand-building campaigns to stay front of mind for customers — this optimistic and spirited approach indicates that leaders across the board are applying lessons from the pandemic. Our goal is to continue building effective measurement solutions, and as part of the many approaches that we’re exploring, we also are applying new AI technologies to measure campaign success and understand the buyer’s path to purchase.”

Key individual

Abhai Singh, Head LinkedIn Sales Solution, India

Yahoo

Ritu Mittal
North & South Monetization and Agency Relationship

"At Yahoo we are pursuing growth opportunities through our ad tech business, focusing on key growth drivers in India, including Demand-side Platform (DSP), Supply Side Platform (SSP), and Native Platforms into a unified stack. With one of the fastest growing DSPs in India, Yahoo’s ad business in the country has been a strong contributor in the company’s transformation to growth globally over the last several quarters, and we are very proud of these accomplishments, despite being affected by tough macro-economic factors.”



Shriram Narayanmurthy

Senior Manager, India Sales

"The last-click attribution model may make sense today, but it’s imperfect and will diminish quickly. In this tough economic environment, brands need to start focusing on what’s effective. At a time when e-commerce has soared, marketers have focused on the lower funnel, chasing audiences for those last clicks, and optimizing their campaigns accordingly, especially on social media. Yet, when we’re heading towards the cookie-less future, and in tougher economic conditions, pumping more money into last clicks alone will not suffice.” 

Key individuals

Swapnil Maske, DSP Strategy Lead, India
Sushil D’Souza, Sr. Manager Field Sales
Kishor Kumar, Sr. Manager Field Sales
Himanshu Goswami, Sr. Manager, Field Sales

Airtel Ads

Vignesh Narayanan
Head of Business

Narayanan heads the Ads business for Airtel and has extensive advertising experience having led business roles in Europe & Asia for 17+ years. His expertise in the digital ecosystem stems from his experience in e-commerce companies like Lazada, Zalora, Snapdeal, Reebonz, and with core Adtech technology companies like Mediamath helping him to create the right product-market fit across Adtech & Martech.

Sharechat and Moj

Estimated Advertising Revenue: Rs 212.16cr for FY22  

Udit Sharma
Chief Revenue Officer, Sharechat and Moj

"Given that 180 million Indians use ShareChat monthly to consume content in their own languages, I aim to establish it as the platform of choice for advertisers who are also looking to engage their target audiences at scale in the language of their choice. As for Moj, I plan to work with our partners to help them collaborate with India’s largest creator community in building tailor-made solutions to help them meet their brand objectives. ShareChat and Moj are India’s fastest-growing advertising platforms, which are seeing massive interest from advertisers across industries. Our ability to deliver innovative and creative solutions at scale to drive engagement for brands sets us apart from other publishers and helps advertisers go beyond regular media inventory buys. At ShareChat, we are gunning for 5X growth in revenue in 2022. We are growing our focus on artificial intelligence extensively and hiring not only in India, but in the UK, U.S., and other geographies.”

Key individuals

Neha Chatterjee, Sales Director (East)
Debasmita Ghosh, Sales Director (South)
Satyen Kishan, Regional Director Sales 
Satyajit Deb Roy, Senior Sales Director (North)

Twitter India

Revenue: Rs 157 cr for FY22  

Kanika Mittal
Country Head, Twitter India

Kanika Mittal is the Country Head for Twitter India leading large customer solutions and is responsible for Revenue and Monetization across industry verticals, like Auto, CPG, Tech, OEMs, M&E, Enterprise and others. During the course of her tenure, she has landed a strong positioning for Twitter with brands centred around the power of conversations and helped diversify and grow the business. Her role intersects Marketing, Technology, Digital, Policy and Culture.

Jio Ads

Gulshan Verma
CEO, Jio Ads

Gulshan Verma joined Jio Ads in 2021, and before assuming this role, he was responsible for Disney+ Hotstar Ads’ business covering Sales, Sales Strategy, Operations, AdTech/Data Partnerships, branded Content Studios (Brand Lab), Measurement/ROI, and Customer Marketing. He is also credited with setting up Hotstar Brand Labs. Prior to Disney+ Hotstar, Verma was with Times Internet as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), where he was responsible for all revenue streams across Content/Media, Transaction and Classifieds businesses. He has also worked at Komli Media, Yahoo!, EY, McKinsey, and Associated Press. He is an alumnus of London School of Economics, Indian School of Business, and Kellogg School of Management.

Key individual

Viraj Jit Singh
CRO, Jio Entertainment Services

Chanpreet Arora

SVP, Head of Business - AVOD (Voot) at Viacom18 Media

In her current role Chanpreet Arora drives the AVOD business – VOOT and is responsible for leading AVOD led partnerships that are key to VOOT’s overall growth. Over the last 20 years she has been a core leader in the launch and scaling of leading international and local media brands in India including VICE Media, The New York Times, Formula One, Times Internet, Discovery Channel and Formula One.