Women to Watch 2022: Devika Sharma, InMobi

Devika Sharma

Director, APAC O&O Business
InMobi
India

As a 20-year veteran in the industry, Devika Sharma is one to uphold her career goal of consistently reinventing herself. When she joined InMobi to drive monetisation and business growth plans for Glance, an Indian AI software company owned by InMobi, it was January 2020, just before the Covid pandemic. Since then, she drove five-fold growth in revenue for the first year and continued to lead a three-fold revenue growth year-on-year by the end of 2021.

Over these two-and-a-half years, Sharma led a team of 15 new employees virtually. Co-working with brands such as Coca-Cola, Skoda, L’Oréal, Intel, Unilever and Amazon, she went beyond the Indian market in 2022, driving Glance’s growth in new regions, such as Indonesia. She was promoted to director of APAC O&O Business in July this year.

Sharma’s role quickly evolved from managing sales to being a strategic leader who can drive growth for InMobi’s owned and operated properties. In collaboration with product, brand strategy and account management teams, she also shapes native ad experiences and content integration on Glance.

Sharma plays as the ears for the business, and she values feedback to guide and shape strategies for other teams, such as client solutions and product teams. Her customer-centric approach and inter-department coordination have led to the creation of some best-performing ad experiences at Glance. 

Sharma respects the importance of a diverse workplace, as she passionately supports the growth of women and joins the core team at WInspire, InMobi’s DEI programme, by hosting fireside chats with women leaders and mentoring many. She has also spoken at multiple industry events hosted by Exchange4Media, Adgully, and the Mobile Marketing Association. As a critical contributor to the L&D pillar of InMobi’s agency partner programme, she has hosted and led workshops on diverse topics such as gaming and lock-screen marketing.

Throughout her brilliant career, Sharma has been the brains behind multiple award-winning campaigns in India for brands such as Volvo, Sprite and HSBC. She began her marketing journey as a management trainee at CavinKare, then moved to Candid Marketing. She has been promoted seven times in 13 years and joined Mindshare as head of activation before becoming sales director of InMobi in 2020.