GroupM promotes two in India

GroupM India has announced the promotion of Sidharth Parashar to president for investments and pricing and Ashwin Padmanabhan to president for partnerships and trading.

Both will join the GroupM executive committee and will continue to be based out of the GroupM’s Gurgaon office. They will report to Prasanth Kumar, CEO of GroupM South Asia.

Kumar said, “The elevation of both Sidharth and Ashwin is a testament of GroupM’s continued investment in its talent which has helped build a strong leadership pipeline, creating leaders to take our business into the future. In this ever-evolving integrated media ecosystem, we understand the importance of having leaders across key client focus areas like media investments and trading. Both Sidharth and Ashwin are astute leaders and I am confident that they will continue to drive client delight and expand GroupM’s reach across platforms.”

The men have been leading GroupM’s pricing-investment and partnerships-trading practices, respectively, over the years and will take over their new roles from this month.

Parashar has been with GroupM for over 15 years. He joined as the agency buying head for Maxus and has played a key role in evangelising the buying function in the organisation. In his new role, he will be responsible for leading GroupM India’s investment mandates across all media. All the GroupM agency trading heads and cluster heads will continue to report to him. He said, “I am delighted to join the executive leadership team. GroupM has always raised the bar on innovation and providing exceptional value to our esteemed clients. I look forward to continuing delivering these company values each day.”

Padmanabhan joined GroupM from Reliance Broadcast Network where, as the COO he led the network’s radio and television business. At GroupM, along with his trading roles, he also leads the Motion Content Group. Under his leadership, Motion’s unique value proposition of content production, financing and monetization across platforms has become a big differentiator to the entire content ecosystem, said a company statement. Padmanabhan said, “GroupM gives a unique opportunity to create, innovate and build in an entrepreneurial environment and I look forward to continue enhancing the GroupM value proposition for our clients, media and technology partners.”