Uditvanu Das promoted to vice president at Havas Play

MUMBAI: Sport, at its commercial core, is a business of relationships, and few careers illustrate that better than Uditvanu Das’s climb to vice president at Havas Play. The promotion comes just over a year after he joined as associate vice president in June 2025, a swift ascent that speaks to how well his particular mix of media savvy and sports obsession has translated into results.

The route here was anything but linear, which is precisely what makes it interesting. Das cut his teeth in digital advertising and media sales, cycling through Yahoo, DDB Mudra, UTV and Rediffusion Y&R in the late 2000s and early 2010s, work that taught him how brands think about audiences before he ever touched a sports property. His pivot toward sport proper began at Walt Disney India, building out a digital sales team, before a string of agency and content roles at Skarma, BriefKase and Sooperfly sharpened his commercial instincts further, including a stint conceptualising native content for platforms as varied as personal finance, lifestyle and even NBA.com India.

The real turning point came at Procam International, where Das worked on marketing and business development for marquee running events including the Tata Steel Kolkata 25K and the TCS World 10K, managing relationships with heavyweight sponsors like Tata Motors and GoDaddy. That experience in endurance sports and event partnerships set him up perfectly for the next leap, a two year stretch as general manager of partnerships at Rajasthan Royals, where he ran the commercial operation for both the IPL franchise and its Caribbean Premier League sister team Barbados Royals, bringing in partners such as Red Bull, Dettol and Schneider Electric while pushing sponsorship activations well beyond basic media visibility.

From there, Das moved into athlete management at JSW Sports, where his talent sales work touched some of India’s biggest Olympic names. He helped secure commercial partnerships for javelin gold medalist Neeraj Chopra with brands including Tommy Hilfiger and Omega, negotiated a renewal with Tata AIA Life Insurance, and in the run up to the Paris 2024 Olympics, closed partnerships for steeplechaser Avinash Sable with Deloitte and long jumper Sreeshankar Murali with Toyota. A subsequent stop at Burman Sports saw him lead sales and business development, including work on Bigbasket’s tie up as official quick commerce partner for Royal Challengers Bangalore across the IPL and WPL.

That breadth, running events to franchise cricket to individual athlete endorsements, is precisely the kind of full-spectrum sports commercial experience agencies like Havas Play are increasingly hunting for as brands pour more marketing spend into sport. Das himself credited Rana Barua, Mohit Joshi and Tabassum Modi for their backing, a nod to the kind of institutional trust that tends to accelerate careers in this business. With India’s sports sponsorship market continuing to swell across cricket, athletics and beyond, Das looks well placed to keep building on a decade of relationships built one partnership at a time.