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  • Assembly Global appoints Vivekanand Kini as regional director APAC

    Assembly Global appoints Vivekanand Kini as regional director APAC

    MUMBAI: From Yahoo to Hungama, from HP to Akzonobel and now, the Assembly hall. Vivekanand Kini has joined Assembly Global as regional director for client experience, a move that marks the next chapter in a 15-year-plus career spent shaping digital journeys for some of the world’s biggest brands.

    Kini, who steps into the role this September, brings 18 years of experience across digital marketing, e-commerce, and client strategy, including 8 plus years in leadership positions. Most recently, he was regional head of digital & e-commerce at Akzonobel (2022–2025), where he spearheaded digital growth across Asia. Before that, he helmed HP’s digital marketing for over six years (2016–2022), leading campaigns and customer experience initiatives out of Gurgaon.

    His career foundation was laid at agencies and media firms: Havas Media (2013–2016) as associate director for media, Saatchi & Saatchi (2012–2013) as senior manager for client servicing, and Yahoo (2011) where he drove online media spends in retail. He began his digital journey at Hungama (2010–2011), managing brand solutions for marquee clients such as 7UP, Bacardi, LG, and Maruti Suzuki.

    At Assembly Global, Kini will be tasked with deepening client relationships, scaling regional strategies, and ensuring Assembly’s philosophy of Showup, Makechange, and Winwell translates into measurable client success. His portfolio of skills spans Adobe experience manager, marketing mix modelling, conversion optimisation, growth marketing, customer insight, and media trends expertise Assembly hopes will fortify its client-first positioning in Asia.

    Kini described the new role as a “perfect fit” for his passion for partnership and impact: “Mobility, technology and customer behaviour are evolving rapidly. This is an opportunity to reimagine client experience at scale, powered by both empathy and innovation.”

    For Assembly, a company known for its digital-first, culture-driven marketing approach, Kini’s appointment comes as it doubles down on APAC expansion and builds on its strong momentum with global clients.

    Looks like Assembly has found its newest building block and Kini is ready to cement lasting partnerships.

  • HT Media cashes in as Swapnil Ravindran takes charge of South revenues

    HT Media cashes in as Swapnil Ravindran takes charge of South revenues

    MUMBAI : HT Media Group has found its new rainmaker in the South. Swapnil Ravindran has been appointed chief revenue officer (CRO) for South, a role that will see him drive growth across Hindustan Times, Hindustan Hindi, and Mint. Ravindran, who took charge in August 2025, brings a two-decade career spanning Yahoo, Inmobi, The Times of India, and Kasturi & Sons, with a strong record of scaling revenue engines across print and digital. At HT, his mandate is clear: accelerate revenue growth, deepen advertiser relationships, and integrate strategy across platforms to bolster the One HT narrative in southern India.

    It’s a homecoming of sorts. Ravindran spent a decade at HT Media (2005–2015), rising from deputy manager to general manager. Since then, he has helmed sales at Yahoo, led national digital and print mandates at The Hindu Group, and spearheaded e-business and branch verticals at The Times of India. Most recently, he was associate vice president and response head at Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. (Nov 2024–Aug 2025) and before that, director of sales (West & South) at Inmobi.

    Over the years, he has managed marquee brands, sharpened sales strategies, and built high-performance teams skills now directed at expanding HT Media’s footprint in one of India’s most competitive regions.

    Armed with a PGDBA in Marketing from VIT (1999) and nearly 20 years of leadership across advertising sales, business strategy, and digital transformation, Ravindran is expected to play a pivotal role in powering HT Media’s South operations to new heights.

    From Yahoo to Hindustan Times and back again, his journey is a story of full-circle ambition only this time, the brief is bigger, bolder, and distinctly southern.

  • Anuj Sahai exits Peak XV, sets sights on fresh ventures in AI and startups

    Anuj Sahai exits Peak XV, sets sights on fresh ventures in AI and startups

    BENGALURU: After a two-year stint as chief product officer at Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India & SEA), Anuj Sahai is charting a new course. Sahai, who announced his exit this week, said the role offered him a ringside view of the startup ecosystem and hands-on experience with artificial intelligence.

    Sahai, who has held senior posts at Walmart Global Tech, Ola, Flipkart, Payback and Yahoo!, is now advising early-stage founders on tech stacks, workflows and agentic AI. “I’ll be recharging and reflecting over the next few months while exploring new opportunities,” he said, inviting connections from entrepreneurs and investors alike.

    Over a two-decade career, Sahai has built a track record of scaling digital businesses: he led Walmart’s US marketplace product team to a significant share of e-commerce revenues, launched Flipkart’s advertising platform into India’s No 2 ad business within 15 months, and forged landmark partnerships for Ola Play.

    For now, the industry will be watching which venture the product veteran picks as his next big play.

  • Sawhney jumps ship to Campbell Pacific, eyes Indian media pie

    Sawhney jumps ship to Campbell Pacific, eyes Indian media pie

    MUMBAI: Rajiv S Sawhney, a seasoned tech and digital whizz, has landed a new gig as country manager for India at Campbell Pacific Media, hot on the heels of his stint at Thakral Corp. Sawhney, who boasts a CV sprinkled with big names like Amazon, Yahoo, and even a sojourn with Manchester United, is set to spearhead the firm’s expansion into the bustling Indian market.

    Campbell Pacific Media, a “unique independent media consultancy,” is betting on Sawhney’s knack for forging strategic partnerships and navigating the choppy waters of emerging markets. The aim? To leverage his expertise in CRM and new media to whip up customer engagement strategies that’ll have brands and ad tech companies salivating.

    With a network of over 1000+ entrepreneurs, founders, industry experts, agencies, brands & freelance partners, Campbell Pacific is clearly aiming to be the go-to for anyone looking to crack the Asian market.
    Prior to this, Sawhney clocked nearly five years at Thakral Corp, where he steered the ship as vice president and general manager for India and South Asia, and briefly as chief executive officer of Thakral One Solutions. His past exploits also include a stint as a strategy advisor for Manchester United.

    Before that, he was busy at Amazon, leading business development and partnerships in Singapore, and at Yahoo, where he was senior director and head of global partnerships for APAC. He also served as a founding team member and business head at Reliance Group’s Zapak Digital Entertainment, and as head of ecommerce at Times Internet.

    Sawhney’s move signals Campbell Pacific’s ambitious play in India’s burgeoning digital and ad-tech landscape. With his track record, they’re clearly hoping he can score a hat-trick in the Indian market

  • Mindshare Fulcrum appoints Bharat Sethi as principal partner – programmatic

    Mindshare Fulcrum appoints Bharat Sethi as principal partner – programmatic

    MUMBAI: Digital marketing professional  Bharat Sethi has joined Mindshare Fulcrum as principal partner – programmatic, bringing over 15 years of industry experience to the role.

    Sethi, who previously served as head of media at Tatvic, boasts an impressive career spanning major tech firms including Google and Yahoo. During his five-year tenure at Google, he developed expertise in data analysis, digital strategy and software as a service (SaaS).

    His appointment comes as Mindshare continues to strengthen its programmatic advertising capabilities across video, display and connected TV platforms.

    Prior to Google, Sethi worked at Cognizant as an account manager for Doubleclick India. His earlier roles include optimisation strategist at Yahoo and account manager at Komli Media, where he managed performance and re-marketing campaigns across India and southeast Asia.

    Sethi holds an MBA in information technology/finance from SVKM’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies and a BE in computer science from Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology.

  • Gracenote hires Bill Michels as chief product officer

    Gracenote hires Bill Michels as chief product officer

    MUMBAI: He’s got noteworthy credentials. Bill Michels, who was brought in as AC Nielsen’s content solutions business unit Gracenote’s chief product officer,  has held senior leadership roles in companies like Moloco, The Trade Desk, Foursquare/Factual and Yahoo.

    As chief product officer,  Bill has been given the responsibility for leading Gracenote’s global product team as the company looks to grow its suite of video, sports and music products and accelerate key market expansion initiatives.
     

    “As Gracenote redefines the role of metadata in an AI world, it was important to bring in someone like Bill Michels who has successfully built data businesses and platforms powered by machine learning,” said Gracenote CEO Jared Grusd, CEO. “Bill joins at a very exciting time for Gracenote and his adjacent experience will help the company think more horizontally and accelerate our growth initiatives.”

    Bill brings two decades of product management, engineering and data partnership expertise across CTV, ad tech and search to Gracenote, as well as deep experience operationalising and scaling products globally. 

    “As someone who is passionate about data, the chance to create products powered by Gracenote’s unparalleled dataset—the industry’s most comprehensive and enriched—is truly exciting,” said Bill Michels. “I’m thrilled to join such a talented team and eager to bring my experience to the table as we drive Gracenote’s next evolution of growth.”

    Bill’s appointment marks the most recent addition to the Gracenote executive leadership team. Earlier this year, Phani Kalagara was named chief technology officer for Gracenote. Phani is a highly accomplished technology leader with deep expertise building large, diverse and high performing global teams. He has held various leadership roles at multinational companies such as PayPal, Flipkart and Advanced Interactive Systems. Most recently, Phani served as chief product and technology officer at Pine Labs, a privately held fintech company focused on building merchant platforms and payment solutions that enable efficient financial transactions.

  • Yahoo Messenger to shut operations from 17 July

    Yahoo Messenger to shut operations from 17 July

    MUMBAI: The emergence of new messenger apps in the smartphone era has brought down the closure of decades-old instant messaging application, Yahoo Messenger. Verizon subsidiary Oath, operator of Yahoo, recently announced the wrap up of Yahoo Messenger with its services coming to an end on 17 July. 

    One of the earliest messaging app, it started its journey in 1998. Yahoo Messenger, once a very popular player witnessed its declining user base eventually due to several new services including smartphone chat apps such as Whatsapp, Skype, Facebook Messenger among others. Existing users now have six months in hand to download their chat history before the service becomes unavailable. 

    In a statement issued on Friday, Yahoo said, “There currently isn’t a replacement product available for Yahoo Messenger. However, we are constantly experimenting with new services and apps, one of which is an invite-only group messaging app called ‘Yahoo Squirrel’ which is currently in beta form.”

    While avoiding any specific reason behind the shut down of the Messenger, Yahoo said, “As the communications landscape continues to change over, we’re focusing on building and introducing new, exciting communications tools that better fit consumer needs.”

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  • IPL chief Shukla recuses from ‘live-streaming’ media rights auction

    IPL chief Shukla recuses from ‘live-streaming’ media rights auction

    MUMBAI: The BCCI has planned to live-stream the bidding process for awarding media rights of the Indian Premier League (IPL) media rights on 4 September. Although an appeal by Rajya Sabha MP Subramanium Swamy’s for e-auction was struck down by the Supreme Court, this seems to be ‘transparent’ part of the process, which will bring in Rs 200 billion for BCCI in a five-year deal — a growth of 455  per cent from the last deal.

    Efforts are reportedly afoot to live-stream the auction either on iplt20.com or bcci.tv or both.

    Meanwhile, IPL chairman (Congress leader and a television channel co-owner) Rajeev Shukla, who faces allegations of conflict of interest despite getting a clean chit from former BCCI ombudsman retired justice AP Shah, has recused himself from the auction of the T20 League to be held in Mumbai. Shukla has refuted allegations that BAG Films, which is owned by his wife, had an understanding with the potential bidder Star Sports.

    Considering recent entries of Yahoo, Airtel, BAMTech and DAZN/Perform Group, the list of bidders has reportedly gone up to 24 including Star India, Followon Interactive Media, Taj TV India, Amazon Seller Services, Sony Pictures Networks, Times Internet, Supersport International, Gulf DTH FZ LLC, Reliance Jio Digital, GroupM Media, beIN, Econet Media, SKY UK, BTG Legal Services, ESPN Digital Media, BT PLC, Twitter and Facebook Inc.

    Two significant changes can be seen in this time’s auction. The rights would now be auctioned for a five-year period up to 2022), and rights for seven territories are being auctioned as opposed to 2008’s two sections — India and international rights. Television rights in India are believed to see a neck-and-neck race. Conditions stated in the tender make it compulsory for the digital partners to delay the live-streaming by five minutes and allocate 80 per cent of the bidding amount to broadcast rights, eventually making the equation favourable for Star India and Sony Pictures.

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  • TV ads & apps: A-Pac mobile analytics growing fastest, connected TVs’ adoption stimulating demand

    MUMBAI: the global mobile analytics market will continue to witness pronounced growth over the forecast period on the backdrop of a slew of factors. Increasing demand for real-time analytics to deliver personalized ads and growing investment in digital advertising across mobile platforms is expected to influence the demand for mobile analytics in the near future, according to Persistence Market Research analysis.

    Further, higher investments in developing advanced mobile apps and exploding number of smartphone users are additional factors anticipated to support the overall market growth. In contrast, a dearth of technological understanding for operating high end functionalities of mobile analytics solutions and increasing concerns over privacy breach associated with customer data may inhibit market growth during the next eight years.

    On the basis of solution type, demand for application performance analytics solutions is expected to remain dominant throughout the projected period. In addition, the application performance analytics solutions segment is set to register the highest revenue by solution type.

    On the basis of development, cloud-based development is expected to remain as the most attractive segment, increasing at a CAGR of 21% during the forecast period 2016-2024.

    By end user vertical, the e-commerce & retail segment is projected to account for a comparatively higher share of the market. Further, the segment is projected to expand at over 22% CAGR through 2024, followed by media & entertainment segment.

    Microsoft Corporation accounted for a turnover in excess of US$ 93 Bn in 2015, with its latest bridge application tool “HockeyApp” launched in August 2016 gaining immense popularity amongst users. Adobe Systems Incorporated, Yahoo! Inc. (Flurry Analytics), International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), Tune, Inc., Google Inc. (Alphabet Inc.), Amazon Web Services, Inc. (Amazon.com, Inc.), Localytics (Char Software, Inc.), Webtrends Inc., and Mixpanel, Inc. are amongst other prominent players operating in the global mobile analytics market.

    PMR indicates North America to remain at pole position of the global mobile analytics market, accounting for the highest revenue share during 2016 to 2024. In 2015, the market in the region was valued at over US$ 560 Mn and expected to reach US$ 2058.7 Mn by 2024. Further, the market in Asia Pacific is predicted to be the fastest growing market, expanding at a CAGR of 22.4% over the forecast period. This is primarily due to robustly growing fascination towards mobile technology and rapid smartphone penetration in countries such as India and China.

    The arrival of smart TV technology and increasing demand for TV apps is expected to present scope of long-terms business for market players. Robust adoption of connected TVs is steadily stimulating the need for dedicated analytics solutions for measuring performance and effectiveness of both TV ads and TV applications. Moreover, growing necessity of integrated mobile analytics solutions and a higher number of connected personal devices such as laptops, wearable devices, smartphones, and tablets is fueling the demand for integrated analytics solution in order to manage data exchange across multiple devices.

  • Adspend: Twitter fastest growing, FB & Google control 20%

    MUMBAI: Google and Facebook together accounted for 20% of global advertising expenditure across all media in 2016, up from 11% in 2012, according to the new edition of Zenith’s Top Thirty Global Media Owners. These two companies captured 64% of all the growth in global adspend between 2012 and 2016.

    The Top Thirty Global Media Owners report is Zenith’s unique ranking of the world’s largest media companies, and is being published since 2007. For this edition, it has decided to update its methodology and focus purely on media owners’ revenues from advertising, excluding revenues from all other activities, which gives the true measure of their status in the global advertising market.

    Google (under its holding company Alphabet) is by some distance the largest media owner in the world, attracting US$79.4bn in ad revenue in 2016, three times more than the second-largest – Facebook – which attracted US$26.9bn. The largest traditional media owner is Comcast, which takes third place in our ranking, with US$12.9bn in ad revenue.

    As we stated in our quarterly Advertising Expenditure Forecasts, internet advertising has overtaken television to become the world’s largest advertising medium this year. Accordingly, digital platforms that are funded by internet advertising dominate our top 30 ranking. As well as Alphabet and Facebook, there are five more pure-internet media owners in the top 30: Baidu, Microsoft, Yahoo, Verizon and Twitter. Between them, the seven digital platforms generated US$132.8bn in internet ad revenue in 2016 – that’s 73% of all internet adspend, and 24% of global adspend across all media.

    Verizon became a media owner in 2015 when it bought AOL, and if all goes to plan will become a much larger one when it acquires Yahoo later this year. Verizon takes 21st place in our current ranking; adding Yahoo to AOL would boost it to sixth.

    The fastest-growing media owner in our list is Twitter, which increased its ad revenues by 734% between 2012 and 2016. Tencent is second, having grown by 697% over this period, and Facebook is third, with 528% growth. Two other media owners have more than doubled in size between 2012 and 2016: Baidu, which grew 190%, and Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which grew 171%.

    Most of the media owners in our ranking – 20 out of 30 – are based in the US. The US dominates for several reasons: the US has the biggest ad market, US companies have invested the most in extending their reach abroad, and Silicon Valley innovation has powered the growth of internet advertising. China and Germany each have three media owners in the ranking (Baidu, Tencent and CCTV for China, and Bertelsmann, ProSiebenSat.1 and Axel Springer for Germany). Then there are four countries with one media owners each: France (JCDecaux), Brazil (Grupo Globo), Italy (Mediaset) and the UK (ITV).

    “The scale of the biggest platforms highlights the importance of building strong partnerships between agencies and media owners,” said Vittorio Bonori, Zenith’s Global Brand President. “Brands need to deal with these platforms to communicate with consumers effectively and efficiently, and agencies need to ensure they do so on the best terms available.”

    “Zenith’s new ranking demonstrates just how much the internet advertising platforms are setting the pace for global adspend growth,” said Jonathan Barnard, Head of Forecasting at Zenith. “Google and Facebook alone have accounted for almost two thirds of global adspend growth since 2012.”

    Ranking of Top 30 Global Media Owners 2017

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