Hariharan Vishwanath joins MEC as national trading head

Hariharan Vishwanath (Vishy) has taken up the role of national trading head at Mediaedge:cia. Earlier, he was general manager, Maxus, Bengaluru.

The designation of national trading head is a newly formed one at GroupM, wherein all the agencies under its umbrella will have individual trading heads reporting to Prasanth Kumar, overall trading head, GroupM as well as their respective agency heads. In Vishwanath's case, apart from reporting to Kumar, he would be reporting to T Gangadhar, managing director, Mediaedge:cia.

Subsequently, he joined Mindshare as planning director when the agency was launched, and was looking after brands such as IBM and Nike. In 2006, he assumed the role of business director.

In 2007, he moved to Maxus, another agency in the GroupM fold, to take up the larger role of general manager at the agency's Bengaluru branch.

Throughout his career, Vishwanath has been based in Bengaluru. However, this will be his first stint at media buying. "Though I have worked a little here and there on media buying, I have solely concentrated on media planning all this while. Stepping into buying this time is a conscious effort," he says.

Gangadhar, in a media release, says, "Trading has been identified as one of the greatest variables for us to turn to our advantage and create real, tangible value for our clients. As MEC's trading head, Vishy will be responsible for exploiting the GroupM leverage to its fullest extent on behalf of our client partners."