GroupM appoints Lakshmi Narasimhan as Chief Growth Officer, South Asia

GroupM the country's foremost media investment management group, and parent company for India's best media agencies- Mindshare, Maxus, MEC, Motivator and Mediacom today announced the creation of a new structure that focuses on enhancing its support for the Agency brands so as to maximizing value for clients.  The changes are in line with the vision set forth by GroupM and its Agencies to create a future ready organization.

GroupM announced the appointment of Lakshmi Narasimhan as its Chief Growth Officer for South Asia. Lakshmi will take charge of the media partnerships and digital teams. With this appointment, GroupM has merged the erstwhile CTG group with the GroupM Digital platforms. In this role, Lakshmi will ensure client benefit by leveraging GroupM scale seamlessly across all media touch points. Lakshmi has prior experience with the group with stints at Mindshare Fulcrum and GroupM as Head of CTG. He was the CEO of Web18 till April 2014, the digital unit of the Network18 group. Lakshmi joined on 4th May. All the present CTG and Digital teams will report into Lakshmi.

Tushar Vyas has been promoted to the role of Chief Strategy Officer - GroupM South Asia.  Tushar has been heading GroupM Interaction, the digital media arm of GroupM, a unit he helped set up many years ago and which has now been fully embedded in the respective agencies. In his new role Tushar will help guide GroupM’s future focused vision by harnessing data, digital and content to develop products for the future. GroupM is working on several initiatives to build new media products with a special focus on emerging categories like ecommerce. Tushar has a core team of digital product specialists, data scientists and content experts.

Sridhar Ramasubramanian, Chief Financial Officer is being promoted as the new Chief Operating Officer of GroupM South Asia. In his new role Sridhar who is a GroupM veteran and had played a key role in its growth will lead not just the financial, commercial and IT teams but also manage the markets of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The GroupM CEOs of these markets will now report to him. He is also tasked with ensuring new initiatives within the organization that would significantly optimize existing GroupM processes, and lead the GroupM ExCo’s effort to develop new practices across South Asia. Sridhar, Tushar and Lakshmi Narasimhan will report into CVL Srinivas, CEO GroupM South Asia. The current Agency Heads and Specialist Unit heads of GroupM will also continue reporting to Srinivas. Tushar and Sridhar assume their new roles with effect from May 1st.

Speaking on these developments, CVL Srinivas, CEO, GroupM South Asia said, “We recast our growth plans in early 2013 with an organizational transformation program. This helped us scale new peaks with 2014 being perhaps our best year till date. We will now have dedicated senior leadership to focus on the present as well as the future. More than anything else, clients today expect their agencies to help them navigate a very complex and uncertain world. We are fortunate to have a very strong leadership team across GroupM backed by solid support from our regional and global offices. Sridhar, Tushar and Lakshmi are outstanding professionals all of whom have played major roles in developing our network.”

GroupM and its agencies have been broad basing their Talent profile to include digital product and technology experts, content specialists and data scientists. The network has been consistently developing its leadership talent by giving them newer opportunities both within and outside the South Asia region.

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