Prasanth Kumar elected AAAI president

Hyderabad: Prasanth Kumar, CEO, South Asia, of GroupM Media (India) Pvt Ltd was elected president of the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) for 2022-23 at its annual general body meeting held on Tuesday.

Calling advertising a dynamic and idea-driven industry, Prashanth said he looked forward to building synergies with like-minded people and organisations to achieve the goals set, as AAAI president.

"As always, I expect lots of support from my peers and colleagues within AAAI as well as from the broader ecosystem as well," he added.

A GroupM veteran with over 25 years of experience in industry, Prashant has worked at Pepsi, The Media Edge and McCann Erickson, among other organisations, before joining GroupM.

Immediate past president, Anupriya Acharya, will be the ex-officio member of the AAAI Board for 2022-23. Rana Barua, Group CEO, Havas Group, India, was unanimously elected vice-president. Other elected members included Vishandas Hardasani, Kunal Lalani, Rohan Mehta, Chandramouli Muthu, Sridhar Ramasubramanian, Shashidhar Sinha and K. Srinivas, Vivek Srivastava.

Outgoing president Acharya congratulated  Kumar on his election and said, "He has been a key member of the Indian media and advertising industry for a long time. I'm sure he will take the association from strength to strength."

The Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) is a not-for-profit, industry-led and industry-managed trade association of advertising agencies, formed in 1945, to promote their industry interests so that they continue to make an essential and ever-increasing contribution to the nation.

The AAAI today is representative, with a very large number of small, medium and large-sized agencies as its members, who together account for almost 80 per cent of the advertising business placed in the country.