PMG Asia promotes Prashant Kaul to chief operating officer

SINGAPORE: Career arcs rarely come tidier than this one. Prashant Kaul has been promoted to chief operating officer of PMG Asia, the wholly owned Hakuhodo subsidiary, putting him in charge of operations across every market the agency runs in the region. It caps a run that began with Kaul essentially building the company’s India business alone.

The numbers tell the story better than any title change could. Kaul joined PMG India in 2006, and under his leadership the operation grew from a one-person setup to a team of more than 250 professionals by 2026, spread across offices in Bengaluru and Mumbai. That is not incremental growth, that is a business built from zero into a genuine regional force over two decades, and it explains why the promotion reads less like a reward for tenure and more like the logical conclusion of two decades spent proving the model works.

His path there ran through a fairly classic advertising apprenticeship before the entrepreneurial stretch began. Kaul joined PMG Singapore in 2003 as business development manager, having already done time at McCann Erickson India and J. Walter Thompson Singapore, giving him grounding in both the Indian and South East Asian advertising ecosystems before he was ever asked to build anything of his own. That grounding mattered once he did: after joining PMG India in 2006, he was appointed managing director for India in 2016 and took on the additional role of managing director for South Asia in 2021, leading the expansion into integrated marketing communications and working across sectors with a genuinely wide client base.

In his new role Kaul will oversee operations across PMG’s Asian markets, with an explicit mandate to improve integration across markets, delivery and growth, essentially applying the same playbook that worked for India at a continental scale. Kong Man Haw, chief executive of PMG Asia, credited Kaul as instrumental in building PMG India and expanding its footprint across South Asia and ASEAN, a fair summary of a career that has spent two decades turning regional presence into regional infrastructure. Kaul himself struck a collaborative note on the appointment: “I look forward to working closely with our leaders and teams across markets to strengthen our integrated capabilities, drive operational excellence and create greater impact for our clients and partners.”

The appointment matters beyond one executive’s career trajectory because of what it signals about Hakuhodo’s regional strategy. Rather than parachuting in outside operational leadership for a pan-Asian mandate, the group has chosen the person who has already demonstrated, over 20 years and one market, that he can take a business from a standing start to genuine scale. Kaul holds a master’s degree in international marketing from the University of Technology Sydney, rounding out a profile that blends academic grounding in the discipline with two decades of on-the-ground execution. For PMG Asia’s other markets, that is a useful signal: the person now responsible for their operations has already proven, in India, exactly what disciplined scaling looks like.