MUMBAI: Senior media professional Anjali Kasbekar, who was working with the Ravi Kiran-headed Starcom West and South as a consultant has bid adieu to the firm. Kasbekar has hopped on to Tata Teleservices to look after the media functions of the telecom company.
 

 
Starcom India executive director (North), Anita Nayyar confirmed Kasbekar's departure.
Says Kasbekar: "I have been in the advertising industry for two decades now and I now want to be on the other side of the fence. The telecom industry is a very dynamic industry and is booming right now. I see it as a tremendous opportunity for me to put my experience into the company."

Kasbekar joined Tata Teleservices on 12 May. She has varied experience and was with Lintas in the late eighties-early nineties as a media director. She quit Lintas and was a member of the core team that founded Carat along with Meenakshi Madhavani in nineties. Also in the interim period she was involved closely with ICICI Bank for a marketing project. At Starcom she handled Heinz.

"Tata Teleservices has a very clear focus and I want to use my experience to achieve the goals that the company has set for itself. I see it as a huge challenge and I am very excited about it," says an elated Kasbekar.

Kasbekar will be involved in the media buying and planning for the company and will work closely with its creative (McCann Erickson) and media agencies (The Mediaedge - TME).

She will have her work cut out for her. For starters, Reliance is spending big time money on promotion and advertising. Then Tata Teleservices itself is on an aggressive expansion spree.
Currently operating in eight circles that is Delhi, Maharashtra, Mumbai, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Chennai and Gujarat, Tata Teleservices has a customer base of about 1.6 million.

With a planned nationwide footprint across the country, Tata Teleservices has licences to operate in 11 more circles, which include Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Kolkata, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh (East), Uttar Pradesh (West) and West Bengal.

The company is getting aggressive in Maharashtra too and Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Limited (TTML), which launched CDMA wireless services in July-August 2003 in Mumbai, Pune and other cities in the western India state, is expanding its network to cover 150 towns and cities with presence in every district in Maharashtra and Goa. It has a claimed subscriber base of 485,000.