Amit Pandey promoted to vice president, supply, at WPP Media

GURUGRAM: Addressable television in India did not build itself. Somebody had to persuade broadcasters, technology vendors and agency planners that targeting individual households on live and on-demand TV was worth the trouble, and Amit Pandey has spent much of the last decade doing exactly that. He has now been promoted to vice president, supply, media solutions, India, at WPP Media, a step up that puts him in charge of supply and platform partnerships across the group’s digital advertising business in the country.

The promotion caps a run that has tracked the entire arc of programmatic advertising’s arrival in India. Pandey joined GroupM in December 2020 as head of supply and platform partnerships, building the addressable TV solution that let advertisers target audiences across on-demand, linear and live streaming environments at scale. When GroupM was rebranded as WPP Media in 2025, he stayed on as head of supply and platform partnerships before this latest elevation, now steering product, supply and solutions teams with an explicit mandate to make ai foundational to every new build.

That mandate is a natural extension of what came before it. Pandey’s brief has always sat at the intersection of content, data and technology, managing long-term relationships with content providers on ad inventory acquisition, data licensing and audience insight, while also developing partnerships with adtech vendors, retail and e-commerce platforms, and broadcasters across CTV, digital out of home and native channels.

His path there runs through some of Indian digital media’s most consequential build-outs. At Sony Pictures Networks India he headed programmatic sales and ad strategy for SonyLIV, selling marquee sports and entertainment properties including Indian cricket, the UEFA Champions League, La Liga and Serie A, alongside GEC juggernauts like Kaun Banega Crorepati, The Kapil Sharma Show and Super Dancers. Before that, at Times Internet, he was the first salesperson in India to close a programmatic guaranteed deal spanning audio, display and video simultaneously, scaling the company’s programmatic direct business to $2 million within a year and eventually managing a Rs 120 crore programmatic revenue book growing 90 per cent year on year. He also brought Colombia’s outstream video format to India at scale, an early bet on emotionally engaging ad formats on premium sites such as the Times of India, the Economic Times and Gaana.

Earlier stints at PubMatic and Zee Media Corporation gave him the operational grounding, cross-channel campaign management, yield optimisation and programmatic infrastructure, that eventually let him operate at the strategic altitude WPP Media now needs. It is a career built less on any single big break and more on being first through the door on nearly every new format Indian digital advertising has adopted, from programmatic audio to addressable television.

For WPP Media, promoting from within on the strength of that track record is a low-risk, high-conviction call. As addressable and connected TV inventory in India keeps expanding and ai increasingly sits at the centre of media planning, having someone who has already built the plumbing once is a considerable head start.