What I have actually shipped.

ads.timesofindia.com is a self-serve platform with an unusual audience. Agencies book in volume and know exactly what they are doing. Everyone else is booking one obituary, one matrimonial listing, or one property ad, possibly the only one they will ever place. The same funnel has to work for both. Most of what we lost, we lost in the gap between someone deciding to advertise and someone finishing an ad.

So we put help in three places where people were stopping.

Tourism is the hardest kind of brand work: you are selling a place you cannot change, to people who have already been sold a hundred other places. I worked on both accounts across the full range, from The Great Backwaters and Visit Kerala campaigns to Ayurveda led positioning, and then on the digital side as it became the main channel.

The work I am proudest of is the Go Kerala mobile app, the Maya WhatsApp bot, and the VR activations we put into major airports, because they took a tourism board from advertising at people to answering them.

Alongside the campaign work, I represented Kerala Tourism at 20+ international trade fairs — WTM London, ITB Berlin, FITUR Madrid, MITT Moscow — and helped organise flagship events like the Kerala Travel Mart and the Tourism Investors Meet, which pitched 39 projects worth over ₹2,500 crore.

I ran the Incredible India social media mandate from 2016 to 2019, then spent three years on the creative panel to 2022. On social, I started the Instagram account and built it from nothing, and grew the Facebook page into the second most-followed tourism page in the world, behind Australia. We were shipping 40+ updates a day across eight platforms, with the content calendar, creative, and community all handled in-house.

On the creative panel from 2019, the work moved to print and campaign creative for the Ministry of Tourism — the campaigns below come from those years.

A new metro has one chance at a first impression, and most of it happens on a phone before anyone reaches a station. I ran the digital launch: website, mobile apps, CRM integration, live chat, and the customer service platforms behind them, coordinating between the client, the agency, and the development teams.

I led a team of more than forty people delivering insights, analytics, dashboards, and programmatic work for UK clients, alongside PHD, OMD, H&S, and MGOMD. The real problem was not analysis, it was that four agencies were measuring the same campaigns four different ways. Most of my year went into standardising reporting, visualisation, and behavioural insight frameworks so the numbers meant the same thing to everyone.

Beyond individual accounts, I was responsible for the digital business: pitching it, staffing it, and delivering it. Clients included Incredible India, Karnataka Tourism, Milma, Aster Medcity, Silk Air, and Kochi Metro.