Hires & Promotions: Tata Digital, Ampersand Advisory

Mahalakshmi Iyer elevated to director of brand marketing at Tata Digital 

Mahalakshmi Iyer has been promoted to director of brand marketing at Tata Digital.

Previously, Iyer worked for John Jacobs as Head of Marketing between 2020 and 2022. Before this, she associated with Walt Disney Direct-to-consumer & International as a strategy and research consultant in 2020. Before this, she was associated with Bewakoof.com, Star TV Network, General Mills, Infosys, and The Consulting Club. 

Iyer has expertise in market research across media, entertainment and ecommerce space.

Kunal Sinha joins Ampersand Advisory

Kunal Sinha has joined the Malaysian agency, Ampersand Advisory, as chief knowledge officer.

Sinha has over three decades of experience, two of which were spent living and working in Mumbai and Shanghai. His most recent stint was in M&C Saatchi Indonesia, which gives him a unique perspective over Asia.

Sinha has worked in leading agencies such as JWT, Ogilvy and McCann and data consultancies like Kantar and The Futures Company. He also ran Ogilvy Asia’s consumer and cultural trends program, and sustainability practice Ogilvy Earth.

He has also delivered branding and consumer solutions for companies such as Unilever, Intel, Diageo, BAT, Mondelez, SC Johnson, VF Corporation (The North Face), International Hotels Group, The Economist, Visa, Arla Foods, Smithfield Foods, Spotify, Truecaller, TikTok, Permata Bank and Mundipharma in key Asian markets.

He has driven market innovation for firms such as Ceat Tyres, Godrej Consumer, Aegon Life, Amazon, The Times Group, and organisations like UNICEF and AmCham.

On his new role, Sinha says, “Joining the purposeful and highly successful team at Ampersand Advisory is an exciting proposition. This gives me the opportunity to create a strong positioning for our consulting and analytics proposition. It also provides me with a platform to explore a new market and gather more understanding of evolving consumers in Asia.”

Sandeep Joseph, CEO and co-founder of Ampersand Advisory adds, “I’ve been an admirer of Kunal’s work for many years, and he had also asked me to write for WARC when he was consulting them. We have built Ampersand Advisory as one of the fastest growing agencies not just in Malaysia but across the Asia Pacific, as evidenced by our featuring in the FT Statista 500 High Growth Companies Asia Pacific for two years in a row."