DOD 2019
Drivers of Digital Awards and Summit

Amit Purohit

Amit spearheads Digital Business Pan India with P & L responsibilities. The Digital Business has mandates for Digital Sales & Strategic Alliances, Digital Marketing, Digital Operations and Customer experience and Digital Technology for business verticals like Investor, Distributor and Corporates. He has been instrumental in revamping Digital business and has been leading from the front with respect to bringing out many “Industry first” innovations in the Digital space. Digital Business has been able to successfully roll out new Digital Assets viz. Partner portal, Partner App, APIs for Digital partner integrations, Micro-sites for Tax Planning etc. in recent times and some of the initiatives are setting benchmarks in the industry. Amit’s career spans over 18 years across varied industries like BFSI, Telecom and Pharma. In past Amit was associated with organizations like Reliance Mutual Fund, Tata Docomo and ICICI Bank for business functions like Product Management, Strategic Sales & Business Development and Marketing.Amit is an MBA from Pune University and is a BMGI certified Green Belt holder in Six Sigma.

Amit Sethiya

A marketing strategist with a penchant for creating and establishing regional and PAN India brands
across segments like Steel, Real estate and consumer electronics segments over the last 15 years. He has
a passion towards influencing customers mindset across national and international markets by being a
creative and business choir for generating optimal brand equity using traditional and digital media. Radio Jockeying, writing, travelling and teaching are the other interests on the personal front that primes up skill sets pertaining to customer understanding, story-telling, project planning, team handling and training etc eventually adding up to the functional efficacies.

Manav Sethi

As Group CMO, Manav looks after both Eros Now and the studio business. He is responsible for brand, consumer growth & retention, talent, trade and PR across both these businesses. In his earlier role he was founder CMO for ALTBalaji, India’s first SVOD OTT platform which broke the notion that Indians don’t pay for content.In his last role at Getit he launched multiple businesses and brands in India and Malaysia across Yellow pages, Horizontal Marketplace and verticals like grocery and furniture, mobile wallet and a merchant lending platform.At Reliance Big Entertainment, he was the founder of then India’s largest online local search platform that got investment interests from Navteq & acquisition interest from Justdial. He was also part of founding co worked on launching businesses across FM Radio, Music, Motion Pictures, Movie rental & download, online gaming & a JV with Dreamworks Animation SKG. In his earlier stints, Manav exited a startup in stealth mode that created an IP that helped telecom towers reduce their energy costs.He has formal education in Management and Law.

Tushar Ghagawe

Digital marketer with excellent understanding of Indian consumer behavior and all aspects of Brand Marketing. Marketing professional with over 19 years’ experience in Marketing and Sales. Experience of working with varied industries like Travel, FMCG, Media and Finance. Experience of leading multi – functional teams including marketing, creative, project management, content, analytics and external partners to drive sustainable growth.

Prabhjyot Singh

Prabhjyot Singh is a Marketing professional with 15+ years of experience in the industry. His experience spans across sectors like media houses, e-commerce and digital agencies. Currently, he is the General Manager – Marketing & Digital, Strategic Planning, Events & Content at ShowBox – National 24×7 Music TV Channel. During his career, he has been responsible for the launch campaigns, media buying, budget allocation, overall growth of the companies, scaling up the e-commerce business through digital mediums, generating new revenue streams and strategic planning for the new business development. Worked on several expansion plans in entertainment media, digital, publishing, OTT.

He has hands on experience with Branding & Digital strategies and setup online businesses from scratch. Developed online brands and delivered strong year-on-year revenue growth. Digital story teller with proven experience of creating winning solutions for Global & Indian brands.

He has worked on: ShowBox Music TV Channel, Epic TV, Studio Showbox, PTC Punjabi, PTC News, PTC Play, Tapp Me, Shopmate, Nokia, Store99, LivingGifts, etc.

Balaji Vaidyanathan

Balaji Vaidyanathan is a seasoned marketing leader with over 17 years of insightful global experience in brand, advertising, digital, content and mainline. In his current role as Marketing Director, CEEMEA for Franklin Templeton based out of Dubai, Balaji is responsible for all strategic marketing initiatives for the CEEMEA region. He leads a team across multiple geographies, covering over 20 countries across Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa and focusing both on institutional and retail businesses. Prior to this role, Balaji was Deputy Head – Marketing for Franklin Templeton India and was responsible for leading all key brand initiatives and investor education programs. In his initial part of his career, he has also been associated in various capacities with the Aditya Birla Group and the Edelweiss Group. Balaji has been one of the early adopters of leveraging gamification, video content and storytelling in the mutual fund industry to promote investor education in the online space. His deep understanding of consumer marketing and customer lifecycle journeys have won him several awards in India and globally across creativity, content, innovation and effectiveness.

Sai Narayan,

As Chief Marketing Officer, Sai  Narayan is responsible for leading the Brand, PR, Digital Marketing& Social Media efforts at Paisabazaar.com. He carries more than a decade’s experience across Brand Management, Advertising, Digital Marketing, Social Media and PR functions. Prior to joining the Policybazaar Group, he had worked within marketing and brand management roles at leading insurance companies, Max Life insurance and Aviva India. During the early part of his career, he has also worked with leading advertising agencies like JWT and Publicis India.

ARVIND R P

Arvind R P is the Director – Marketing and Communications, McDonald’s India, heading overall marketing and communications strategy for brand, to further strengthen its leadership in the QSR space.

He joined McDonald’s in January 2019, before which he was the Vice President and Head – Marketing, IT& Analytics at Kaya Ltd. At Kaya, his unique and insightful strategies played a crucial role through various brand building initiatives, product & services innovations& category building initiatives.

He has over 18 years of experience in Marketing and Sales across various geographies and categories such as Retail (Levi Strauss), Consumer goods (Britannia) and Automobiles (TVS Motor Company). His career at TVS Motors included an assignment for the SE Asian market based out of Jakarta.

Arvind started his career with TVS Motors and worked across various roles including Consumer & Market insights,Brand Management and Sales. He was also selected to be a member of a start-up team at TVS, to set up business in Indonesia. Post TVS, he joined Britannia to head the Dairy Category Marketing and lead the innovation process. He also had an exciting stint with Levi Strauss where he headed Brand and Retail Marketing.

Arvind holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics and has completed his MBA from Bharathidasan Institute of Management, Trichy. He has also been appointed as a Board Member for the Mobile Marketing Association, India.

Angad Bhatia

Angad Bhatia is a part of the senior leadership team at Times Internet. He is the Founder of
MensXP and the COO of TIL’s emerging media track called Indiatimes Lifestyle Network.
At Times Internet, he founded the Indiatimes Lifestyle Network which includes
Indiatimes.com, MensXP, iDiva, WhatsHot etc. and led it through an explosive growth
phase, from 5 million to over 40 million unique users in 18 months. ILN is a youth and new
media collective that is built around the social web. In December 2016, Indiatimes.com was
ranked the world’s most engaged brand on Facebook ahead of Fox, CNN, Nytimes,
Huffington-Post, Buzzfeed, etc.

Archana Tiwari Nayudu

Archana is part of the leadership team at upGrad, which is a high-growth EdTech promoted by Ronnie Screwvala. It is positioned to be a disruptive leaders in EdTech and towards curating human capital to serve the future. The company has been awarded the ‘Best Tech for Education’ by IAMAI in 2019. upGrad also received the ‘Best Education Brands’ award by Economic Times and has made it to LinkedIn’s ‘Top 25 Start-ups’ two years in a row in 2018 and 2019.
Archana comes with over 18 years of professional experience with a strong focus on creativity, context and commercial goals spread across all mediums and formats of media : Print, Digital, Television & Live Events including CNBC TV 18 & The Economic Times. She is experienced at front ending brand outreach projects as well as managing seamless backend processes. Skilled to deliver original content and creative ideas, she has created and managed end-to-end content and communication marketing projects. Rich B2B experience, hands on working experience with SMEs and start-up eco-system globally, Archana has the distinguished career with highlights including being invited by the Rashtrapati Bhavan to curate Global Innovation roundtable and being part of international forums along with being the force and face of ET Digital Transformation Series in her past assignments. Highly networked professional with strong connects with industry influencers, academia and policy makers, she believes education and technology when combined has the potential to change the future and fortune of Bharat & India. She promotes learning for all and learning as a way of life to stay relevant amidst technological disruption and economic upheavals.

Vivek Jain

Vivek Jain heads the Strategy function at Times Internet.
Vivek has over 15 years of experience in helping large MNCs & start ups define
product vision, strategy and roadmap. Prior to Times Internet, he was the Chief
Product & Technology Officer at Housing.com. Earlier, he was the VP Products –
Digital Media at Jio and Product/Business Head at AWS Bandwidth. He has worked
at several multi-nationals including SMC Networks, Google and the US Dept of
Commerce.
Vivek received his BE in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of
Mumbai and MS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the Illinois Institute of
Technology.

Pravinkumar Bhandari

Born in Mumbai, Mr Pravinkumar Bhandari has been a bright competitive person, always
ready to learn something new & exciting. While growing up he developed an extreme passion
for technology specially in Finance Sector. He has completed his MBA in Information
Technology, an ITIL Certified Pravin comes with a great experience of over 20 years in
Digital Product Transformation.
His expertise lies in FinTech and Telecommunications along with Payment Processing
Industry & IT Infrastructure Management.
Currently he is working as the Chief Business Officer at ePaisa, his role is to entails tasks
and processes towards business development by implementing growth opportunities within
and outside the organizations. Prior to this, he was handling Vtalkers Pte Ltd as the Chief
Technology Officer & Chief Operating Officer where he re-branded Vtalkers, introducing new
products and positioning as an MVNO moves, from USD2.1M to USD5.3M company in 14
months.
He has also worked as the Head Global with Pure Commerce Pte Ltd (Euronet Worlwide) in
Singapore, Head Service Operations with Indiaideas.com Ltd in India and in many more
listed companies.
At ePaisa he is focusing on to introduce new services and solutions which will digitalise &
simplify all segments of an SME Business activities along with company e xpansion in
different regions of the country.
Also pursuing his Phd in Micro Finance, Pravin in his spare time, likes to keep himself active
by reading and writing over a cup of hot coffee. If not working, you would find him
interacting with people talking about Fintech.