BS People: Anupriya Acharya

From Singapore to South Asia

For Anupriya Acharya, the move back to Mindshare from Aegis is like coming back home. She was part of Mindshare Fulcrum — the unit that handles the Hindustan Unilever media business — between 2000 and 2004. In her current posting, though, she has a regional role, heading up the entire Unilever business in the South Asian region.

For the veteran media agency professional, who has spent nearly 20 years in agencies such as McCann-Erickson, The Media Edge (Rediffusion's media arm) and GroupM, this is possibly the most challenging of them all. Over 52 per cent of Unilever's business comes from emerging markets. And some of them sit right here in South Asia, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The sheer volume of work managing Unilever in South Asia can be gauged from this: Her team has a mammoth five million (or 50 lakh) spots (that is, the number of times ads appear on TV) to manage annually. That is, 4.16 lakh spots a month or 13, 866 spots a day. Acharya admits the task is in no way easy.

Mindshare handles Unilever's media business in Western Europe and North America besides Asia-Pacific. Being the second-largest consumer goods maker in the world after Procter & Gamble, it’s a marquee business for most agencies to have.

The challenge facing Acharya is that media consumption habits vary from market to market, and managing this diversity is not easy. Yet, Acharya says she has had a taste of this in her previous role as CEO of Aegis Media in Singapore between 2009 and 2011 where she had to deal with exactly this.

Digital, Acharya says, will be given special emphasis given Unilever's increasing focus on it. "While South Asia still has a vast ‘non-digital’ consumer base, there are enough netizens too. And while percentage-wise this number may look small, in absolute numbers this ‘netizens’ population is larger than entire populations of many sophisticated markets," she says.