MAM
Akash Sharma leaves Zee Media to become chief strategy officer at Admerly
The publisher monetisation platform snaps up a decade of hard-won industry experience
Admerly, a publisher monetisation platform operating within the BE Group ecosystem, has recruited Akash Sharma as chief strategy officer, poaching him from Zee Media Corporation, one of India’s largest media conglomerates, where he served as assistant vice president of digital monetisation.
The move is a sharp pivot: from running revenue at scale inside a broadcasting giant to shaping the strategic direction of a scrappy platform built to rewire how India’s digital publishers make money. Sharma brings more than a decade of publisher-side muscle to the role: programmatic strategy, yield management, direct advertiser partnerships, and the unglamorous but critical business of revenue operations.
At Admerly, his remit is broad. He will define the company’s go-to-market strategy, deepen ties with enterprise publishers, and steer the product roadmap to meet the shifting demands of an advertising ecosystem that shows no sign of slowing its churn.
Sharma was unambiguous about what drew him across the table. “After more than a decade on the publisher side, building revenue engines, managing demand partnerships, and learning what it takes to monetise content at scale, I made a deliberate choice to move to a platform that I believe is solving the right problem in the right way,” he said. “The best monetisation strategies are the ones that work for the viewer, not just the balance sheet. At Admerly, that principle isn’t a secondary consideration. It’s the foundation of how the product is built.”
Arun Raghav, founder and business head at BEdigitech, made no secret of why the hire matters. “Akash has lived that world. He’s built revenue systems, managed complex demand relationships and made the tough calls that come with monetising content at scale,” Raghav said. “Having that perspective in our leadership team changes how we build, how we sell and how we show up for our customers.”
For Admerly, landing a practitioner who has felt every pressure publishers face is less a luxury than a statement of intent: that it means to be taken seriously, and fast.
