MAM
Padmanabhan joins Neo Cricket as national ad sales head
MUMBAI: Manoj Padmanabhan has joined Neo Sports broadcasting as Neo Cricket national head of ad sales.
Padmanabhan will report to Neo Sports Broadcasting executive VP – network sales Raju Udupa.
He moves in from Somerset Entertainment Ventures (Singapore), where he was senior sales advisor for nearly 10 months. During his stint there, he was instrumental in setting up and creating a business model for the Sri Lanka Premier League.
Padmanabhan said,”Neo is in an interesting growth phase. With the best cricket content for the next few years, I look forward to creating value for the advertisers and maximising revenue for the organisation.”
Before Somerset, Padmanabhan was working at Bloomberg UTV as VP sales for a period of 10 months. Prior to that, he worked at Ten Sports for a period of over four years as director of ad sales.
Udupa added,”We have an action packed season lined up and I am glad to have Manoj on board. He is known for his sharp acumen and sales expertise and I am confident of Neo achieving greater heights.”
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.
