Abhishek Bhattacharya joins Madison World as vice president

MUMBAI: Abhishek Bhattacharya has made the switch that many in Indian media talk about but few actually pull off, jumping from the publisher’s side of the table to the agency side. He joins Madison World as vice president, where he will lead a portfolio of brands at Madison Media Ultra, bringing 21 years of relationship building with him.

The move caps a career built almost entirely inside broadcast ad sales, most recently at JioStar, where Bhattacharya spent close to two years as senior director and national head of agency partnerships for the entertainment business, having transitioned there from JioStar’s sports vertical after a full decade in that space. Before the Reliance owned entity took shape, he was associate director for ad sales at Disney Star’s Star Sports, where he ran the show as regional lead west across FMCG, media, entertainment, OTT and social categories for India’s largest sports broadcaster.

His sports sales record reads like a highlight reel of Indian advertising’s biggest moments. Bhattacharya was behind onboarding Tata Neu as an IPL sponsor across two seasons, brought Audi into the Premier League broadcast, and secured Parle Biscuits’ return to IPL sponsorship after a five year gap. Earlier campaigns with Gillette Mach3 on Pro Kabaddi and Vodafone’s badminton league activation even picked up a bronze at the Emvies for best media innovation on television, proof that his knack for brand integration goes back years.

Before Star, Bhattacharya cut his teeth across some of India’s biggest media houses: Bennett, Coleman & Co, ABP Group, HT Media and Bloomberg TV India, working consumer durables, BFSI and financial services accounts along the way. At ABP, he managed the LIC of India account, one of just twenty one major accounts identified nationally by the group, and was recognised as the youngest executive to receive its 360 degree media training.

Bhattacharya has been candid about what the move means to him, describing it as a shift in perspective rather than simply a change of employer. For an industry where publisher side and agency side executives rarely swap seats, his arrival at Madison World will be watched closely, both for what he brings to the agency and for what it signals about where senior sales talent in Indian media is headed next.