GroupM promotes senior leaders in Central Trading Group

The company has promoted Sidharth Parashar and Jai Lala. Parashar was with Maxus, while Lala was with Mindshare.

GroupM has promoted two senior executives in its Central Trading Group (CTG). The company has promoted Sidharth Parashar as head, pricing and investments, and Jai Lala as head, trading and partnerships.

Both Parashar and Lala will report to Prasanth Kumar, managing partner, CTG, South Asia.

Before his promotion, Parashar was agency buying head for Maxus for more than five years, and held the media mandate for brands such as Google, Nokia, Vodafone and others. In his new role, Parashar will facilitate and execute GroupM investment mandates across media. His key focus will be on the GroupM trading products that should continue to offer the edge to clients. All the GroupM agency trading heads and cluster heads will now report to him.

Lala was agency trading head for Mindshare, where he worked on media mandates for clients such as Pepsi, GlaxoSmithkline, ICICI, Aditya Birla Group and Nike. Going forward, he will manage all trading mandates at GroupM. He will also head a team of all leaders across verticals such as proprietary media, DTH, Xaxis, syndication, GME and special projects.

Speaking on the new structure, Kumar says, "As we move into a growth phase largely driven by converging synergies across the group and driving client satisfaction, it has become critical that we create more focus, especially in the area of media investment. With the development of new concepts of integrated media merging traditional and digital media, we are also looking at reforming the way we plan our investments as a central hub. This new structure in our core function will deliver unparalleled client delight and value."

Earlier, Lala has worked with Madison Media. He will also work closely with Parashar and the agency trading heads on delivering maximum ROI on media investments.