Sociomantic appoints Prasanna Iyer as commercial director, India

Sociomantic Labs has announced the appointment of Prasanna Iyer as commercial director for India. In this role, Iyer will be responsible for driving Sociomantic's revenues in India and for building the company's Mumbai-based sales and services teams.

During his tenure at Times, Iyer was responsible for overseeing the operations that supported more than five billion adverting impressions monthly, including both direct sales as well as automated selling.

With regards to programmatic advertising, he was responsible for helping the group to dramatically advance its adoption of programmatic advertising technologies, in turn enabling Times Internet to increase its programmatic revenues, using multiple supply-side platform partners across different geographies.

He was also instrumental in connecting the pipes for Google's programmatic direct-to-launch within Times Internet network, which allows trading desks to execute premium buys on their guaranteed inventory.

Iyer will report to Rohit Kumar, managing director, Asia Pacific, Sociomantic Labs.

Kumar says, "Prasanna has been a champion of programmatic since the early days here in India, and we are thrilled to welcome someone of his experience as head of the Sociomantic India team. His deep-rooted expertise in digital, coupled with his sell-side understanding of the needs of India's advertisers in a rapidly changing industry, will surely prove indispensable as we develop our existing client relationships and continue expanding our customer base. Based on the precedent set by his previous roles, I would expect that this cooperation will lead to a dramatic increase in the overall footprint of programmatic marketing in India."

Prior to Times Internet, Iyer headed global publisher operations at Pubmatic, a supply-side platform and advertising technology company that enables online publishers to sell their advertising inventory programmatically.

At Pubmatic, he worked with some of the biggest publishers in India, including Times Internet, while managing advertising operations teams for US, Europe and Asia Pacific. Before Pubmatic, he worked in several management roles across industries, ranging from logistics to insurance, a diverse range of experience that ultimately led him to the leadership role at Sociomantic.

Iyer says, "I've had the chance to work with dozens of players across the ad tech landscape in my career, and I can say with confidence that Sociomantic has a fantastic platform - the strongest offering in the market. The Indian marketplace is a digital giant, and one that is one at a tipping point when it comes to the growth of programmatic. It is the perfect time to be in the Indian programmatic business. I'm very positive about the company's vision for growth, the exceptional global leadership and the cutting-edge technology that will enable us to deliver real-time value for Indian marketers."

Iyer joins Sociomantic during a period of rapid growth: in the past twelve months, the company has launched operations in Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Czech Republic and Taiwan, bringing its global presence to 21 offices worldwide, serving advertisers in over 70 countries.

Sociomantic Labs, a dunnhumby company, provides programmatic display advertising solutions for online, mobile and social. The company's proprietary streaming CRM technology allows advertisers to harness the value of their CRM and other first-party data assets, to deliver individually personalised, dynamic ads for the full funnel. This results in broader reach, more new customers and increased loyalty of existing customers. Sociomantic has been profitable since its founding in Berlin in 2009 and has grown organically to more than 250 employees.