Times Response undergoes a rejig

The Response department of the Times Group has been reorganized for the year 2023-24, e4m has been told by Times Group officials. 

According to information, Senior executives Ashok Bindra, Sudha Natrajan and Sundar Kondur will be handling North, West and South & East zones, respectively. 

Both Bindra and Natarajan are currently the Directors - Response and Kondur is SVP and South zone head. Kondur is likely to be elevated to the Director's post soon.

The announcements were made on Friday.

Partha Sinha, President of Response, is yet to respond to e4m on the development. 

North Zone

With Ashok Bindra as head, Mandeep Singh, who has been VP (Print, IPs, P&L & Branded Content) is the new regional head North-2. Three business heads Gaurav Batra (Jaipur), Rajeev Gupta (Patna) and Indrani Ganguly (Sr Client Partner) will work under Singh. 

While other business heads- Dhanush Singh (Lucknow & NCR Govt), Vikas Bharwaj (Chandigarh), Shweta Arora (International), Sanjeev Gulati (Senior Client Partner), Sharad Mehrota (Senior Client Partner), Latika Sharma (Senior Client Partner), Ajay Arora (Special Projects) and Ashok Sen (Govt and PSU Strategy) will report to Bindra. 

Bindra will continue to look after North branches – Delhi, Jaipur, Patna, Chandigarh, Lucknow. He will also have the additional responsibility of looking after language nationally. International business will also report into him.

Reema Datta will look after language nationally. She will have a team in Delhi for NBT and the Maharashtra Times and Ei Somoy team will have a dotted line reporting to her. Reema will report to Ashok Bindra and will also have a dotted line reporting to President Response. Language will be an area of focus going forward and Reema will closely work with Subhayu, our new brand head for languages.

West Zone

With Sudha Natrajan at helm, Sai Doma and Prakash D'Souza are the regional heads West-1 and West 2, respectively. Their team comprises Harold Paul (Nagpur), Rohit Macarius (Sr Client Partner), Jasjinder Mehta (Sr Client Partner), Sachin Baxi (MT Horizontal), Rakesh Prasad (Bhopal), Rashmi Kaul (Sr Client Partner), Priti Chandel (Sr Client Partner), Gaurav Ahuja (Pune), Vikram Negi (Ahmedabad), Vishal Vora (Grey Cell & IP), Shishir Bhartiya (response+Digital), Meera V & Shalini Swarup (Capabilities). 

Natrajan will be looking after the west branches – Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Bhopal. For the time being she will also look after Grey Cell nationally.
L&D will now report into Sudha with 2 regional leaders – Meera Venkatraman for South and East and Shalini Swarup for West and North.

South and East

Sundar Kondur’s team comprises various branch heads like Russel Fernandes (Bangalore), Rajshekhar V (Senior Client Partner), Shaju Kumar (Senior Client Partner), Paulson Padyattil (Cochin), Kamal Krishnan (Hyderabad), Manikantan Nair (Chennai), Kaushik Ghosh (Kolkata), Manas Sarangi (Bhubaneswar) and El Samay horizontal. 

Functional Teams

Even functional teams have been shuffled. Subramanian S will continue to head Strategy and Pricing. Rishi Arora (pricing) and Norman Taro (Aop planning and insights) will report to him, as per the information. 

Malcom Raphael will continue to command Response solutions. Ajay Iyer will handle Created Business, IP BD and will look after Red and Green Cells nationally. Executives from different zones - Vikas Bhardwaj, Vinie Alex, Vineet Dhanda, Janak Vora and Subhojoy Bose - will work with him.  

Paresh Thakur, Deepak Malik and Manish Shah will handle Information Technology, Implementation and Revenue Assurance, respectively. 

Other changes

Real Estate and Education will cease to be national verticals and the BVHs will report into respective branch heads.

These changes will take place with immediate effect.