Ignitee promotes Shankar B as COO

Shankar B, national business director, Ignitee Solutions has been promoted as chief operating officer. His role in Ignitee was to expand business across Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru and Secunderabad in India, along with international markets, especially Dubai. In his new role, Shankar will operate out of Ignitee's Delhi office.

Hegde says, "Shankar has had a great start to his innings at Ignitee and I am sure, going forward, he will lead the organisation to many more milestones. Since he will operate out of our Delhi office, this signals the start of our aggressive ambitions in that market."

Prior to joining Ignitee, Shankar was with E 18, the event management arm of the Network18 Group as national head, sales.

In his 16 years of media sales experience, Shankar has worked across print, television, radio and events. He started his career in 1993 with Getit Yellow Pages, from where he moved to The Indian Express, where he headed a special feature division called Mudrai Group.

Shankar also launched India's leading Hindi newspaper, Navbharat. He has worked with the country's leading equity research magazine, Capital Market.

In 1998, Shankar ventured into TV as he joined Chennai based Raj Television Network as manager, from where he moved to Turner International in 2003 as director (West). Here, he looked after the ad sales of TV channels such as Pogo, Cartoon Network, CNN, Zee English and Zee MGM. Later, he went back to Raj TV for one and a half years. Subsequently, he shifted to Hello FM as vice-president, sales and business development for close to two years and was involved in launching seven stations across Tamil Nadu.

Shankar is a graduate in physics with a post graduate qualification in systems management from NIIT. He has also obtained a diploma in sales training and a post graduate diploma in business administration (marketing) from Symbiosis, Pune.