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Isobar India elevates Gopa Kumar as chief operating officer, Anish Varghese as chief creative officer
MUMBAI: Isobar, the digital agency from Dentsu Aegis Network, a global media and marketing communications conglomerate, has elevated Gopa Kumar to Chief Operating Officer and Anish Varghese to Chief Creative Officer with immediate effect. Gopa and Anish will continue to report into Isobar South Asia, Group MD, Shamsuddin Jasani.
On the appointment, Shamsuddin Jasani, Group MD, Isobar South Asia and executive sponsor for DAN Programmatic states, “Gopa has played a very important part in the growth of Isobar for the past 10 years and was already playing the role of Chief Operating Officer. Our creative product has grown leaps and bounds and we now are truly respected as one of the leading creative forces in the digital age and Anish has been front and centre of this. I truly believe that the two of them along with the leadership team at Isobar will steer us to greater heights for years to come.”
Gopa Kumar has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer from Executive Vice President, a position he has held since 2017. Gopa has been pivotal to Isobar India’s continued success in both leading and growing the agencies key client relationships and building the business. As Chief Operating Officer, Gopa will be responsible for overseeing Isobar India’s key accounts and business development with a clear strategic vision for growth.
Anish Varghese has been promoted to Chief Creative Officer from National Creative Director, a position he has held since 2017. Anish will take on the overall responsibility of a refreshed creative proposition and ensure it fills client conversations across Isobar India.
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Smytten appoints Shishir Varma as CEO of Pulseai Research
Rebranded AI platform scales with 150 plus clients and 30 million users.
MUMBAI: In a world obsessed with what consumers say, Smytten is betting on what they actually do. The company has appointed Shishir Varma as chief executive officer of Pulseai Research, signalling a sharper push into AI-led, behaviour-driven consumer insights. The move comes as Smytten rebrands its insights vertical from Smytten PulseAI to Pulseai Research, marking a shift away from traditional, project-based research towards a more continuous, intelligence-led model.
Varma brings over 30 years of global experience across APAC markets, including India, China and Japan. Most recently managing director, Insights at Kantar Japan, he has built and scaled consumer insight businesses across geographies, including playing a key role in establishing Millward Brown in India. His mandate now: turn Pulseai into a category-defining platform in a space still dominated by surveys and static reports.
The pitch is straightforward but ambitious. Instead of relying on claimed responses, Pulseai Research taps into observed behaviour leveraging Smytten’s ecosystem of 30 million users built over a decade of product discovery, trials and purchases. The idea is to close the long-standing gap between what consumers claim and how they actually behave.
The numbers suggest early traction. In under 18 months, the platform has onboarded over 150 enterprise clients across sectors, pointing to growing demand for faster, more reliable alternatives to legacy research models.
Under the hood, the platform blends behavioural data with AI and large language model-led analysis to deliver real-time sentiment tracking, scalable qualitative insights, faster quantitative studies and always-on brand intelligence. In practical terms, that means compressing research timelines from weeks to days without sacrificing depth.
The ambition extends beyond FMCG. Pulseai Research is positioning itself as a cross-category intelligence layer, spanning auto, education, gadgets and emerging consumer segments anywhere behaviour-rich data can sharpen decision-making.
For Smytten, the leadership hire is less about optics and more about direction. With Varma at the helm, the company is leaning into a simple but powerful premise: in the age of AI, insight isn’t just about asking better questions, it’s about watching more closely.
