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How Google views India’s internet landscape

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MUMBAI: After having worked with three tech giants of today – Google, Microsoft and Samsung – Guneet Singh is not hesitant to speak of the power of digital. The Google head of marketing solutions for India and SEA was speaking at the Zee Melt 2018 conference.

At Google since the time digital market was a minuscule fraction in the country, he believes that digital empowers people to market their products providing equal chance. As the industry transformed from TV to digital, creative ecosystem needs to change to understand how the consumption is happening.

“Internet market is led by two things. It’s led by the smart device which has to process and the good network. Both of those were struggling. The first big shift came between 2012-15 when prices were going down and quality of data improved. The next shift came after Jio entered the market,” he revealed in an interaction with Indiantelevision.com.

Owing to the large population, even when only 10 per cent of Indians were on the internet, India was a priority market for Google. Though India’s vast cultural and linguistic diversity makes it a challenging market, Singh thinks every company has to be ready to able to be flexible and appeal to users across the country. According to him, the best way to look at India is not as a country but as a region which has eight to nine geo-clusters or small countries.

India being a priority market, Google has a large marketing team in India. It likes to keep a multi-cultural team in every office. Along with a high number of local population, it also encourages people from other parts of the world to come and work in different countries paving the way to knowledge-sharing.

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One of the major areas Google focuses on India is always having more people on the internet, to really get the value of the internet which is beyond funny videos. It is also working with manufacturers to look at ways to get great performance at affordable prices on Android devices. In 2016, Google launched, in collaboration with Indian Railways, its free high-speed public wi-fi service at five railway stations which has now reached around 400 stations.

“The second part is that as you grow beyond the first 100 million users, we have so many different languages, cultures, there’s an effort on trying to build a vernacularity. The focus is on the content on the internet which is primarily in English and then goes to Hindi, Punjabi, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, whatever India needs and next generation of Indian users comes up from that effort. That’s another big initiative we are taking,” Singh said.

While with the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, GDPR roll out in Europe, protection of consumer data has become a burning issue worldwide, Singh also considers the issue very important. “The internet empowers people. Therefore the way data can be used should be a choice of that individual,” he said. However, he thinks it should not become a rightist movement. People should be given a choice if they are okay with sharing data for getting something better.

With an experience of more than 15 years in the industry, he thinks digital advertising needs to evolve to grab the eyeballs of an audience which has a very short attention span. Six-second videos aren’t always the goal but the right engagement. The optimistic man, however, firmly believes creativity is not dead.

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Ahmad Muneeb elevated to VP – HR centre of excellence at Zepto

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MUMBAI: Zepto has elevated Ahmad Muneeb to vice president – HR centre of excellence, placing him at the helm of the company’s total rewards, executive compensation and organisational effectiveness as the quick-commerce firm powers through a high-growth phase.

The move follows his stint as senior director of the HR COE, where he played a central role in preparing the company for IPO readiness while scaling its people analytics capabilities. During this period, Muneeb helped align complex performance management structures with more streamlined and scalable employee experience frameworks.

In his new role, he will steer the design of total rewards strategies, executive compensation planning and organisational design, while also overseeing performance management, employee experience initiatives and people analytics programmes.

Before joining Zepto, Muneeb spent nearly three years at Meesho, where he held multiple rewards and HR business partner roles. Earlier in his career, he worked as a senior rewards consultant at Mercer, advising high-tech clients on compensation benchmarking, pay structures and talent-focused reward frameworks.

He began his hr journey at Cognizant, where he supported compensation programmes for nearly two lakh employees across India and worked on m&a compensation alignment and skill-based pay initiatives. Prior to moving into HR, Muneeb started his career as a software engineer at Netcracker, bringing a technical grounding to his people strategy work.

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With a mix of consulting rigour, start-up agility and enterprise-scale experience, Muneeb’s elevation signals Zepto’s continued focus on building robust people systems as it races towards its next phase of growth.

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Dell names Aishwarya Sudhakar director of marketing intelligence

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INDIA: Dell Technologies is doubling down on artificial intelligence in marketing. The company has elevated Aishwarya Sudhakar to director of marketing measures and intelligence engineering, tasking her with building an enterprise-wide framework for AI-led measurement and customer intelligence.

In the role, Sudhakar will oversee unified data strategy, advanced modelling and context engineering: areas increasingly central to how large technology firms link marketing performance to business outcomes. Her remit includes shaping scalable systems that support Dell’s next phase of AI deployment across marketing functions.

Sudhakar steps into the position after holding a series of senior roles at Dell, including AI lead for marketing orchestration, senior manager, and senior data scientist in customer insights. Across these roles, she led global teams working on large-scale machine learning models, data pipelines and customer analytics.

Before joining Dell, she began her career at Tata Consultancy Services as a systems engineer and later founded Oclor, a shopping discovery start-up, where she built end-to-end technology platforms. The combination of enterprise-scale data work and entrepreneurial experience has shaped her focus on product-led, engineering-first innovation.

As technology companies seek sharper attribution and intelligence in an AI-saturated market, Dell’s move underscores the growing importance of marketing measurement as an engineering discipline rather than a reporting function.

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Gaurav Pathak returns to Adidas in key accounts leadership role

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GURUGRAM: Adidas has appointed Gaurav Pathak as director of key and field accounts, bringing back an executive who began his leadership career at the company.

In the role, Pathak will be responsible for deepening strategic partnerships and expanding key, field and export accounts, with a mandate to accelerate growth across the Indian market. The appointment marks a return to Adidas after nearly a decade across premium retail and footwear brands.

Pathak most recently served as head of retail and business development at Ecco, where he focused on partner-led growth, market risk mitigation and operational scale. Before that, he spent eight years at House of Anita Dongre Limited, rising to general manager and leading regional operations across western and southern India.

His earlier career includes a stint as regional sales manager for Karnataka at United Colors of Benetton India and a six-year run at Adidas, where he held sales leadership roles.

With competition intensifying in India’s lifestyle and footwear market, Pathak’s brief will centre on strengthening field execution while aligning large accounts with Adidas’s broader commercial priorities.

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