MAM
Industry gears up for 3rd IAA Leadership awards
MUMBAI: The International Advertising Association’s (IAA) India chapter will be holding the third edition of the IAA Leadership awards. The awards celebrate and recognize various individuals from across the fields of marketing, advertising and media, bringing them to one common platform.
The awards will be held on 18 April, 2015 at the Grand Hyatt in Mumbai.
For the third year running, the IAA India chapter will honour women and men in the marketing, advertising and media community for their outstanding performance, innovation and creativity in delivering path breaking marketing initiatives. Twelve categories have been hand-picked based on exhaustive quantitative and qualitative parameters.
This year, shortlisted individuals will undergo even sharper scrutiny by a jury comprising industry stalwarts namely Sunil Alagh (SKA Advisors), Sangeeta Pendurkar (Kelloggs), Kaushik Roy (Reliance), Neeraj Roy (Hungama), CVL Srinivas (GroupM), Gayatri Yadav (Star India), Ramesh Narayan, Raj Nayak (Colors), and Srinivasan K Swamy (IAA India Chapter president). The overall process is validated by Ernst & Young.
Swamy said, “The high admiration that the IAA Leadership Awards has earned from the community in the past two years fuels our enthusiasm to return with our third edition with a bang. We are gearing up to applaud the efforts of those marketers and professionals whose hard work has borne fruition in the past year.”
To add authenticity to the awards and maintain transparency in judging the campaigns, IAA has further streamlined the process, to determine the winners. For shortlisting the nominees, IAA along with its knowledge partner analysed the media spends and market presence of brands between 1 January and 31 December, 2014.
The shortlisted nominees across categories were examined closely by the expert panel of jury members who looked at market share data, growth and other qualitative aspects to pick the winners in each category.
MUMBAI: In India’s fast-moving payments race, Visa has just swiped in a new leader. The company has named Suresh Sethi as its India country head, marking a key leadership shift as it sharpens its focus on digital payments growth in the market. Sethi steps into the role following his recent exit from Protean eGov Technologies, where he served as chief executive officer. He succeeds Sandeep Ghosh, who has moved on after more than four years at Visa to pursue an external opportunity.
The appointment comes at a time when Visa is doubling down on its expansion strategy across India and the wider region, deepening partnerships and accelerating adoption in an increasingly competitive digital payments ecosystem.
Sethi brings with him a broad, cross-market perspective shaped by decades of experience across corporate banking, retail financial services, mobile money and large-scale government technology initiatives. He began his career at Citigroup, where he spent 14 years working across India, Africa, South America and the United States, focusing on transaction banking services within the corporate bank.
His appointment signals a blend of institutional experience and market familiarity qualities that could prove critical as Visa navigates a landscape where fintech innovation, regulatory evolution and consumer adoption are all accelerating at once.
As digital payments in India continue to scale rapidly, the leadership change underscores a simple reality, in a market where every tap, scan and swipe counts, who leads the charge can matter just as much as the technology itself.
