ITV

Category: People

  • Neha Ahuja takes charge as director of growth for Japac at Spotify

    Neha Ahuja takes charge as director of growth for Japac at Spotify

    MUMBAI: Spotify has named Neha Ahuja director, growth for Japac, tasking her with boosting the music-streaming giant’s user base across Japan, Korea, Australia and Southeast Asia.

    Ahuja, a marketing professional with more than 20 years of experience across FMCG, telecom and media, has been with Spotify since 2019. She previously served as head of marketing for India, where she helped launch the service and guided it to market leadership within four years. She also played a key role in building local organisational capability and driving cultural relevance for the brand among India’s youth.

    Before Spotify, Ahuja held senior marketing roles at Vodafone and Procter & Gamble, spanning brand strategy, partnerships and consumer marketing. She also sits on the board of Women in Tech India, part of a global movement promoting diversity in Stem.

    In her new role, she will oversee strategy, marketing, product-market fit and payments, using data, experimentation and cultural insights to drive both free and premium growth.

    “Not every career move is upward—some are outward,” she said. “This one is about building across borders with fresh curiosity and intent.”

  • Mipim names Nicolas Boffi as new director

    Mipim names Nicolas Boffi as new director

    PARIS: Rx France has appointed Nicolas Boffi as director of Mipim, the global urban festival that each March draws more than 20,000 delegates to Cannes. An engineer and urban planner by training, Boffi has over two decades of experience in real estate and urban development, spanning project management, business development and public affairs.

    He joins from Arcadis, where he led strategy for the global cities programme as Paris city executive, working with both the private sector and city leaders on sustainable projects in the French capital and beyond.

    Boffi succeeds Nicolas Kozubek, who steered Mipim through a turbulent period of industry change. Under his watch, Mipim became a forum where real-estate players and policymakers confronted geopolitical risk, technological disruption and the shift towards sustainability.

    Filippo Rean, managing director at Rx France, said Boffi’s “strategic mindset and track record in aligning public and private priorities” would help sharpen Mipim’s position as the place where cities’ biggest challenges—sustainability, resilience and competitiveness—are tackled head-on.

    Boffi said his priority was to deepen dialogue between the public and private sectors. “The next few years will bring economic, political and fiscal challenges that demand collaboration and bold decision-making,” he said. “Mipim must be where uncertainty turns into opportunity.”

    Expect new content under his leadership, from a sharper focus on AI disruption to the race to net zero.
    Mipim returns to the Palais des Festivals in Cannes from 9-13 March 2026. The Mipim Asia Summit runs on 3-4 December 2025 in Hong Kong.

  • Mythik names Preeti Vyas president to steer content and partnerships

    Mythik names Preeti Vyas president to steer content and partnerships

    MUMBAI: Mythik, the tech-first entertainment upstart styling itself as the “Disney from the East”, has hired Preeti Vyas as president of content strategy, partnerships and consumer products.

    Vyas, who previously served as president and chief executive of Amar Chitra Katha, brings three decades of experience across publishing, retail and entertainment. At Amar Chitra Katha, she engineered the heritage brand’s revival, taking it from nostalgia act to profitable modern player while driving readership tenfold to over 6 million globally.

    Her career has spanned founding Fun OK Please publishing, the company behind children’s favourites like Toto the Auto, to senior stints at Future Group, Sony Music, Toys R Us and Crossword. She also piloted transmedia adaptations of franchises such as Tinkle and built licensing deals that expanded their reach.

    At Mythik, she will spearhead efforts to package mythology, history and folktales from the East for a global audience, tapping into new-age distribution and consumer products.

    Mythik, founder and chief executive, Jason Kothari called Vyas “a rare combination of strategic acumen and creative vision” and said her track record of transforming heritage brands would be key to realising the company’s global ambitions.

    Vyas herself described the role as “an opportunity to present stories from our ancient past at a scale never attempted before”.

    Alongside her corporate career, she sits on industry bodies including the Media & Entertainment Skills Council and the Advertising Standards Council of India, giving her a perch at the intersection of policy, talent and content. 

  • Sportskeeda CTO Sankalp Sharma exits after 10 years at the helm

    Sportskeeda CTO Sankalp Sharma exits after 10 years at the helm

    MUMBAI: You can’t spell Sportskeeda without code. And for the last decade, Sankalp Sharma has been the man behind the machine, the chief technology officer who took a broken codebase, a skeletal team, and a laundry list of experiments, and turned it into a battle-hardened platform serving millions of sports fans worldwide. Now, after 10 years and 7 months, Sharma is moving on, leaving behind a tech legacy etched into the site’s DNA.

    Sharma’s tenure has been one of audacious scale. From six hot codebases and a dozen services, his lean team engineered a system that now handles a billion API calls a day with near-million concurrency. As CTO since December 2020 (after stints as VP of technology and tech lead), he not only scaled from “0 to 1, 1 to 10, and on to 100” but also reshaped how Sportskeeda approached experimentation, reliability, and growth.

    Reflecting on his philosophy, Sharma describes his approach as “going wide, going deep, and going around” spotting unnoticed patterns, rolling up his sleeves to refine systems, and navigating future goals through the fog of war. Along the way, he fostered a culture of curiosity, killed fluff projects early, and championed open-source contributions. His earlier career saw roles at Essencemediacom, Mindshare, VML, Foxymoron, TCS, and even a freelance stint helping startups and Fortune 500 companies alike.

    From one-click deployments to site reliability engineering, from streamlining legacy microservices to mentoring LGBTQIA+ professionals and startup founders, Sharma’s playbook has been as much about people as it was about platforms. As Sportskeeda now looks ahead to its next growth chapter, it does so with a tech foundation built on Sharma’s decade-long vision of harmony amid chaos.

     

  • Madison logs into digital future with Vivek Das as chief digital officer

    Madison logs into digital future with Vivek Das as chief digital officer

    MUMBAI: When the digital world calls, Madison Media answers with a double click and its newest hire is set to hit refresh on the agency’s future. Madison Media, part of Madison World, has roped in Vivek Das as chief digital officer, a role in which he will report to Ajit Varghese, partner and group CEO, Madison Media and OOH. With more than 20 years of experience spanning entrepreneurship, integrated media, and digital transformation, Das is no stranger to reshaping how brands connect with audiences.

    Most recently, he was on the India leadership team at Essencemedia.com, where he helmed Google India and Southeast Asia WPP’s second-largest account globally. His résumé also features leadership stints at Mindshare and VML (formerly Wunderman), besides a CEO turn at Foxymoron. Beyond the boardroom, he mentors LGBTQIA+ professionals and startup founders, reflecting a commitment to inclusivity and new-age entrepreneurship.

    Welcoming him aboard, Varghese noted, “Vivek joins us at a pivotal time… At Madison, we are building an AI-first planning framework and embedding digital-first thinking into everything we do. His rich experience makes him the perfect leader to accelerate this journey.”

    Das added his own perspective: “I am thrilled to join Madison at a time of great opportunity and change… In the era of platforms, LLMs, and Artificial Intelligence, I look forward to strengthening Madison’s leadership in new media and enhancing the value we bring to clients and the industry.”

    For Madison, this appointment isn’t just about filling a role, it’s about future-proofing its position in a market where AI, creativity, and consumer-first strategies are rewriting the playbook

  • Saumya Mittal takes charge as McDonald’s chief people officer for Asia

    Saumya Mittal takes charge as McDonald’s chief people officer for Asia

    MUMBAI: McDonald’s Corp has appointed Saumya Mittal as chief people officer for Asia, handing her the keys to one of its most critical growth markets. Mittal, who took charge this month, will oversee the end-to-end people agenda across Asia, partnering with regional leaders to sharpen talent strategy, culture and organisational design.

    She joins from Google, where she spent nearly eight years in senior HR roles, most recently as APAC commercial HR lead, steering transformational programmes across the region. Earlier, she led diversity, equity and inclusion for Google APAC and served as people partner for the region.

    Mittal cut her teeth at PepsiCo, spending a decade across plant HR, IR, talent acquisition, diversity and change management, before rising to head culture, engagement and change. Her early years as management trainee and plant HR manager gave her hands-on grounding in industrial relations and large workforce management.

    Winner of People Matters’ Are You in the List award in 2015, Mittal has also bagged multiple national and international honours during her career at PepsiCo and Google. With 15 years of experience straddling consumer goods and technology, she is expected to play a pivotal role as McDonald’s deepens its bets on Asia’s high-growth markets.

  • Client Associates banks on Mayank Sharma to steer asset allocation

    Client Associates banks on Mayank Sharma to steer asset allocation

    MUMBAI : When it comes to wealth, allocation is everything and Client Associates has made a big one of its own. The multi-family office and private wealth management pioneer, founded in 2002, has appointed Mayank Sharma as director & head of asset allocation and products.

    In his new role, Sharma will chart the firm’s asset allocation strategy while bolstering its product portfolio for India’s affluent set, spanning HNI and UHNI families. His mandate: to deliver forward-looking investment opportunities across traditional assets, alternatives, and global solutions ensuring that portfolios evolve as fast as the markets do.

    With over 15 years of leadership experience, Sharma is no stranger to wealth management’s high-stakes game. His CV features senior stints at Standard Chartered Bank, Nuvama Private and DBS Bank, where he specialised in alternative investments, product innovation, and risk management consistently building strategies with measurable outcomes.

    “Joining Client Associates is an opportunity to bring sharper focus on asset allocation and expand the product suite in line with the evolving needs of Indian HNIs, UHNIs and Family Offices,” Sharma said, adding that his goal is to deliver “long-term, consistent outcomes through a disciplined investment approach.”

    Client Associates co-founder Himanshu Kohli called the move “a significant step forward” in strengthening its ability to deliver sophisticated solutions. “His deep understanding of market dynamics and proven track record in asset allocation will be instrumental in advancing our product capabilities and serving our clients’ diverse investment needs,” Kohli added.

    An alumnus of IIM Calcutta, Sharma brings an analytical rigour honed over years of navigating complex market cycles. His appointment reflects Client Associates’ intent to make asset allocation the bedrock of wealth creation, a philosophy that’s helped it remain a trusted advisor to some of India’s most prominent families for over two decades.

  • Raghu Ramanujam takes charge as vp of product at Nielsen’s Gracenote

    Raghu Ramanujam takes charge as vp of product at Nielsen’s Gracenote

    MUMBAI: Raghu Ramanujam, a seasoned product executive with stints at Flipkart, InMobi and Zoho, has joined Nielsen-owned Gracenote as vice president of product management.

    At Flipkart, Ramanujam steered the payments and fintech strategy, shaping products that sought to democratise access to credit and scale digital transactions for India’s 1.4bn people. He previously founded PoolCircle, once Bengaluru’s largest carpool network, with the mission of taking a million cars off the road.

    At InMobi, he oversaw SmartPay, expanding its reach across nine countries, and built products that propelled the firm from 200m to 100bn ads served per month. Earlier, at Zoho, his NetFlow Analyzer became the company’s fastest product to notch $1m in revenue.

    Ramanujam has also led the product division at Tambora Systems, Embibe and Microsoft Accelerator, and began his career in sales and engineering before moving into software and digital platforms.

     

  • OpenAI names Sheeladitya Mohanty as India marketing lead

    OpenAI names Sheeladitya Mohanty as India marketing lead

    MUMBAI;OpenAI has appointed Sheeladitya Mohanty as its marketing lead for India, tasking him with driving awareness, adoption and responsible use of the firm’s products across the subcontinent.

    An XLRI Jamshedpur alumnus, Mohanty began his career at Nokia in 2009 and later worked at Microsoft as a business evangelist before joining Facebook (now Meta) in 2016. Over nine years at the social-media giant, he handled platform, public affairs and brand marketing roles, most recently serving as marketing lead for Meta AI and Facebook across Asia-Pacific.

    Mohanty says his strength lies in “systems thinking”—connecting workstreams across silos to deliver scale. His expertise spans consumer marketing, go-to-market launches, platform partnerships and large-scale campaign execution.

    At OpenAI, he will lead education and outreach in India, a market critical to the firm’s global ambitions of making artificial intelligence “accessible and impactful”.

  • Sony Pictures’ Juhita Gupta takes lead role on YouTube channels

    Sony Pictures’ Juhita Gupta takes lead role on YouTube channels

    MUMBAI: Sony Pictures Networks India has handed the reins of its YouTube channels to Juhita Gupta, a seasoned media professional with over 16 years of consumer insights and market research under her belt.

    Gupta, who has spent more than a decade shaping programming strategies and audience growth across Sony Sab, Sony Pal, Sony Max and Set, is known for blending data storytelling with sharp commercial impact. Her remit now includes steering Sony’s digital video footprint at a time when streaming platforms are fighting fiercely for attention.

    Before joining Sony, she worked with 9XM, Disney Channel, Hungama, Star Movies and Channel V, giving her a panoramic view of India’s entertainment ecosystem, from kids’ content to blockbuster films.

    She began her career in FMCG research at Nielsen and TNS, tracking categories from skincare to home care. Those early years sharpened her instincts in quantitative and qualitative research, a skill set she later repurposed for television and, now, digital.

    Gupta’s expertise runs the gamut from weekly TV ratings (TAM, BARC) and promo planning to ethnographies, focus groups and social listening. In her own words, she thrives on “insight mining” and translating numbers into narratives, a talent Sony hopes will give its YouTube channels an edge in the battle for viewers.