Mumbai : GroupM, media planning and buying division of communications conglomerate WPP has hired Lakshmi Narasimhan, CEO, Web18 as its first ever chief growth officer for South Asia.
The firm has also promoted managing partner – South Asia Tushar Vyas to the role of chief strategy officer. Chief financial officer Sridhar Ramasubramanian is now new chief operating officer of GroupM South Asia. All of them will report to CVL Srinivas, CEO GroupM South Asia.
In this new role, Narasimhan will be responsible for GroupM’s geographical expansion within India as well as other South Asian markets, besides managing revenues streams of the company. GroupM has also merged its Central Trading Group (CTG), a unit formed in 2004 to handle investments and buying (not planning) for non Hindustan Unilever clients with GroupM Interaction, its digital media arm. Narasimhan will also have responsibility for this merged entity.
Tushar Vyas develop future products for the company (including data, digital and content offerings.) GroupM is working on initiatives to build new media products with a special focus on emerging categories like ecommerce. Sridhar Ramasubramanian will manage GroupM Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan besides leading the financial, commercial and IT teams. The CEOs of these markets will now report to him.
Sridhar, Tushar and Lakshmi Narasimhan will report into CVL Srinivas, CEO, GroupM South Asia. The current agency and specialist unit heads will continue reporting to Srinivas. While Tushar and Sridhar assumed their new roles from 1st May, Narasimhan was on board on 4th May.
“We recast our growth plans in early 2013 with an organisational transformation programme. 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,” Srinivas said.
