Mindshare ropes in Rajit Desai as partner, consulting

With 16 years of experience, Desai ends a five-month stint at Lodestar Universal.

Mindshare, the flagship media agency of GroupM, has roped in Rajit Desai as partner, consulting to further strengthen its consulting and analytics discipline for the western region.

Desai will be based in the Mumbai office of Mindshare and will report to Sandeep Pandey, head of practice, Mindshare.

Desai has 16 years of experience in marketing and media consultancy. As part of his new mandate, he will contribute to the development and restructuring of Mindshare's business consulting and analytics functions.

Speaking to afaqs!, Desai says, "Mindshare is the leading marketing partner for its clients and we advice people on media planning, media buys, research, execution and other aspects. We will try to understand our clients much better in the future and deliver better marketing ROIs for them. We will also leverage data in order to measure the efficacy of the media buys of our clients."

Pandey says, "Rajit's appointment is part of our larger talent restructuring within the consulting discipline and you will hear soon about many senior profiles joining from different industries."

Desai began his career in 1997 at Hindustan Thompson Associates and worked in the media planning function for three years, handling clients such as Lux and Kelloggs. He later shifted to Sony as brand manager and resigned in 2004, as manager, marketing.

He then moved to Times Global Broadcasting as group manager, marketing in December, 2004, and shifted to Media E2E in July, 2006, as vice-president. In October 2007, he joined Turner General Entertainment Networks India as director, sales strategy and planning. He spent nearly four-and-a-half years at Turner before moving to Lodestar Universal in September, 2012, for a very short stint of five months.

Mindshare is part of GroupM and is a global media and marketing services network with billings of more than USD 27.8 billion. The network consists of 113 offices in 82 countries throughout North America, Latin America, Europe, West Asia and Asia Pacific.