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Leo Burnett appoints Karen Ellis as global creative director for SK-II
MUMBAI: Leo Burnett has roped in Karen Ellis as its global creative director for SK-II. She will be based out of Singapore.
“Karen’s outstanding body of work across fashion, luxury and beauty is truly one of a kind and a great fit for SK-II. With Karen on board, we are looking forward to bring about a transformation to the team not just at the global hub in Singapore, but across the world to create work that will further enhance SK-II as one of the leading luxury skincare brands, not just in Asia, but globally,” said Leo Burnett Asia Pacific chairman and CEO Jarek Ziebinski.
Ellis is an award-winning specialist with 20 years experience in design and advertising exclusively for the fashion, luxury and beauty industries. She spent 10 years in New York creating numerous worldwide celebrity campaigns for global beauty brands including Estee Lauder, L’Oreal, Avon and Revlon. She then took this expertise to London, where over the span of 10 years she lead creative on numerous beauty brands but most notably on Hugo Boss global franchise of fragrances.
As global creative director she has worked across Boss Black, Boss Orange and Hugo. She has won Gold Euro EFFIE for her work on Boss Orange Woman, a FWA (Favourite Website Awards) in Digital for “Always Night” (Boss Bottled Night), fragrance FIFI’s and numerous others. Most recently she has been working in Asia, grounding herself with Asian insights and working across markets (India-ASEAN) to create regional campaigns on beauty care.
MAM
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.
