MAM
Mindshare appoints MediaCom’s Sriram Sharma as leader–south
MUMBAI: Mindshare has appointed Sriram Sharma as leader – south. In his new role, which iseffective from 1 August 2015, Sharma will be responsible for all the media and digital mandates for the Mindshare clients in the Southern region.
He will be operating out of the Bangalore office and will report to Mindshare CEO South Asia Prasanth Kumar.
Sharma comes to Mindshare with over 18 years of experience, having worked across multiple industries like advertising, mobile marketing and branding. Currently with MediaCom, Sharma looks after the business in the Bangalore and Chennai office.
Kumar said, “We are glad to welcome Sriram into the Mindshare family. His motivation and wealth of experience across industries and markets makes him the right person to assist in driving the growth of the agency. For us, South is a very important market and I am confident he will be able to lead the south division to even greater heights.”
Sharma added, “Mindshare represents a new journey for me – new skills to acquire, new people to meet and new challenges to deal with. Mindshare has always been a forerunner in innovation and the adaptive marketing world, and I look forward to working with the impressive Mindshare client roster and scaling new peaks in both the digital and traditional media spaces.”
MAM
‘You packed my parachute’: Avinash Kaul’s farewell salutes Network18’s unsung thousands
The outgoing chief’s LinkedIn post skips the boardroom tributes and goes straight to the security guards, drivers and office boys who kept the machine running
MUMBAI: Most farewell posts by senior media executives follow a familiar script: gratitude to leadership, a nod to the team, a hint of what lies ahead. Avinash Kaul’s is not that post.
Writing on LinkedIn on his last day at Network18 Media & Investments, where he spent nearly 12 years rising to chief executive, Kaul bypassed the boardroom entirely and directed his most heartfelt words at the people furthest from it: the security guard who greeted him before the building was fully awake, the fleet staff who drove him to airports at ungodly hours, the office assistants, the housekeeping teams, and the administrators who, as he put it, “held ten thousand invisible threads so the rest of us could look organised.”
“You packed my parachute,” he wrote. “Every day. Without fanfare, recognition, or ever asking for it.”
It was a striking note from a man who leaves behind a considerable operational record. Kaul joined Network18 managing three channels and exits with responsibility for 20, alongside a publishing business, a growing connected television footprint, and what he says is the highest revenue and highest channel share in the group’s history. He was quick to deflect the credit. “Not because of me. Because of 4,000 people who showed up, every day, in every department, across the country.”
To content teams across India, he issued a reminder that carries some weight given the pressures Indian news media currently faces. “Keep being custodians of trust for 700 million people. That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.”
To colleagues in revenue and ratings who found him relentless and hard to satisfy, he was unapologetic but generous. “There was never a single moment of ill intent in my heart. Everything I pushed you towards came from one belief – that you were stronger than you knew, and I was not willing to let you settle for less than your real capability.” Those who believed him, he said, flew. Those who did not taught him to be a better communicator. He was grateful to both.
On what comes next, he offered a hint wrapped in metaphor. Something is being built, he said, prepared for “the way you pack a bag before a long climb. Not out of restlessness. Out of readiness.”
In a media landscape that rarely pauses to acknowledge the people who keep the lights on, it was, at the very least, a different kind of goodbye.
