Twitch names Sandeep Suvarna as APAC marketing head

Six months after it poached Sunita Kaur from Spotify to be its Asia Pacific managing director, livestreaming platform Twitch has made its second senior appointment in the region. The company has appointed Sandeep Suvarna as its APAC head of marketing. 

Suvarna’s appointment leads recent hires in Singapore, to grow the Twitch user base and improve services for content creators, media partners, agencies, advertisers, publishers, and developers across Asia Pacific, the company stated. Suvarna will oversee Twitch’s marketing strategies for APAC audiences, and will build and implement marketing campaigns in the region.

“Twitch is redefining the way we think about entertainment and provides a point of connection for millennials and members of Generation Z who visit the service to socialise with communities of like-minded individuals and creators," he says.

Suvarna joins Twitch, a subsidiary of Amazon, with more than 15 years of marketing experience across prominent brands such as LinkedIn, FOX Networks and Yahoo, where he was responsible for launching new markets in APAC, brand marketing, consumer growth and retention.

His most recent role was APAC VP of marketing for digital streaming services at FOX Networks Group, where he launched FOX+ across key markets in APAC and led teams responsible for brand, product marketing, digital marketing, growth, PR and analytics.

Suvarna's appointment comes as Twitch is seeing blistering growth amid the pandemic. According to a recent study, users watched content on Twitch for over 3 billion hours in the first quarter, and that number leapt to more than 5 billion hours in the second quarter. 

APAC is a key driver of this growth, Kaur said in an interview recently. Non-gaming content on the platform quadrupled over the past three years and in June, the total number of active broadcasters in Asia-Pacific doubled from a year ago.

Kaur, meanwhile stressed that Suvarna's appointment comes just as Twitch's growth has accelerated in APAC. "With Sandeep on board, we look forward to broadening our services, and showcasing both our gaming and growing non-gaming content, to a greater number of users across the region," she said. 

As the pandemic has swept people indoors, esports has gone from arenas to living rooms, benefiting companies such as Twitch, and in APAC, brands have been in hot pursuit of these consumers, according to a Google and Niko Partners report. 

To aid Twitch's ambitious plans, the firm has also appointed Amy Potter as marketing specialist, based in Australia.