MAM
InMobi makes two senior appointments
MUMBAI: As part of its strategy to aggressively tap the mobile advertising space in India, Bangalore-based mobile advertising network InMobi has embarked upon its expansion plans. For this, the firm has appointed Sandeep Deshpande as the country general manager India and Vishal Nongbet as business head of brands.
InMobi has also opened up offices at New Delhi and Mumbai.
In his new role at InMobi Deshpande will be responsible for InMobi‘s business operations and growth in India.
InMobi is banking high on the opportunities available in the Indian market. With an increased penetration of smartphones across age groups and social strata, the mobile ad impressions too are witnessing an upsurge and the advertiser community is accepting this innovation. With the current mobile advertising market in India touching $25 million, it is expected to hit $60-80 million by 2014.
Deshpande has over two decades of experience in launching and growing new businesses. Prior to joining InMobi, he spent nearly a decade in the Internet industry, working for organisations like Yahoo, Alibaba.com and Rediff.com. He was instrumental in launching and growing Yahoo! search marketing, its small business and local search during his stint as general manager.
Deshpande also played a role in setting up Alibaba’s fully owned subsidiary in India during 2010-11 and building the Alibaba brand among SMEs in the local market.
Nongbet brings 13 years of varied experience in lifestyle and youth product marketing, largely in the fields of consumer goods and media and entertainment. A graduate from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, he started his career with Pepsi, followed by Times Music. He then moved to Kodak where he was instrumental in growing their digital businesses into a $30 million business after which he served as head of marketing and alliances at Mumbai Mantra, the filmproduction and distribution start-up of the Mahindra group. He then took on the role of marketing head at SMSGupshup, the mobile marketing start-up.
InMobi founder and CEO Naveen Tewari said, “With their unique blend of experience in technology, expertise in e-commerce and brand marketing capabilities, we are confident that both Sandeep and Vishal will play an important role in identifying new business opportunities and further expanding our operations in India.”
Deshpande said, “I do hope that my experience in setting up new business and in online marketing will help me take InMobi to new heights.”
MAM
Publicis Groupe India launches data-led influencer platform ‘Influential’
A new platform, a seasoned hire and an ambitious plan to bring discipline to India’s booming but chaotic creator economy.
MUMBAI: Influencer marketing in India is big, messy and, for most brands, maddeningly hard to measure. Publicis Groupe India has decided it has had enough of that and is moving to fix it.
The advertising giant has launched Influential, its global creator marketing solution, in India, pairing the rollout with the appointment of Diwaker Chandani as managing partner for Influential India. The brief is blunt: drag influencer marketing out of the spray-and-pray era and into one defined by data, accountability and results that actually show up on a balance sheet.
A fragmented market ripe for disruption
India’s influencer ecosystem has scale in abundance. What it lacks is maturity. Measurement standards are inconsistent, creator databases are riddled with duplication, and brands remain dangerously hooked on organic reach, a strategy that flatters vanity metrics while delivering uncertain commercial returns. Chandani, who brings nearly two decades of experience across digital platforms and media, puts it plainly. “The ecosystem has scale, but not maturity,” he says. “By combining data-led audience intelligence with creator ecosystems and media amplification, we aim to build a model that delivers measurable and repeatable outcomes.”
It is a diagnosis that Publicis Groupe is staking serious infrastructure on. Influential is anchored in the group’s Connected Identity system, which maps consumer profiles to enable more precise audience targeting and creator selection. Layered on top are the Captiv8 platform and Influential’s global creator network, giving brands the tools to plan, activate and measure campaigns across the full funnel, from awareness down to commerce, rather than treating each influencer post as a standalone act of faith.
The hire
Chandani is not an unfamiliar face in the industry. He has held senior roles at Meta, Zee Entertainment and the Network18 Group, working across creator partnerships and content-led media strategies. His mandate at Influential India is to integrate data, creators, media and commerce into a unified framework and to build the team and client roster to scale it.
Anupriya Acharya, chief executive of Publicis Groupe South Asia, frames the launch as a response to a market that has grown faster than its own infrastructure. “The channel has reached scale, but lacks a unified, data-led foundation,” she says. “With Influential, we are moving from a creator-first approach to a cohort-first, identity-led model powered by Connected Identity.” The integration of creators, media and commerce, she adds, will enable more precise and scalable outcomes for brands.
Why now
The timing is deliberate. Influencer marketing in India is expanding rapidly, fuelled by cheap data, a vast and young social-media audience, and brands increasingly willing to redirect budgets away from traditional media. But growth without governance has created a market where consistent returns remain elusive and accountability is largely aspirational. Publicis Groupe is betting that the industry’s next phase belongs not to whoever has the biggest roster of creators, but to whoever can prove, with hard numbers, that those creators are actually shifting product.
The old model of picking a popular face, posting a reel and hoping for the best is running out of road. Influential is Publicis Groupe India’s wager that the future belongs to the spreadsheet as much as the selfie.
