MAM
Tushar Vyas quits WPP after 25 years
GroupM South Asia’s chief strategy office signs off with a farewell note and one eye on startups, academia and social impact.
MUMBAI: A quarter of a century is a long time to spend anywhere, and Tushar Vyas has just called time on his at WPP. In a farewell post that read more like a love letter than a resignation notice, Vyas announced he was turning the page after 25 years with the advertising giant, the latest senior figure to walk out of WPP’s doors this year.
Vyas was no junior hire clearing his desk. As chief strategy officer for WPP India since January 2023 and president of GroupM South Asia since 2019, he sat near the top of the group’s South Asian operation, a perch built over years climbing the ranks at GroupM and MindShare before it. His post struck a wistful note throughout: WPP, he wrote, had been far more than a workplace, a place of learning, friendships and challenges that shaped him as much as he shaped it. He thanked the colleagues, clients and partners who had walked the journey with him, and signed off with a line that gave away where his heart truly lay: he would miss the people most, with the view from his desk coming a close second.
What comes next looks deliberately unglamorous by adland standards. Vyas says he plans to throw his energy into academia, the startup and innovation ecosystem, and the social impact sector, territory he describes as having long sparked his curiosity. It is not entirely new ground either. Long before his GroupM ascent, Vyas spent three years as director and CMO at SureWaves, an early-stage digital media startup founded by second-generation entrepreneurs, an experience that may explain why founders and innovation now beckon more than another agency corner office.
The departure caps a career that traces almost the entire arc of India’s digital media boom: from MindShare in 1999, through GroupM’s Interaction division steering the agency’s earliest digital bets, up to the GroupM South Asia presidency and finally the WPP group strategy chair. Whoever WPP brings in to fill the gap inherits not just a title but two and a half decades of institutional memory. Vyas, for his part, is already looking the other way, towards the next chapter, and by the sound of it, in no hurry to look back.
