AirAsia's chief growth and platform officer Ravi Shankar exits

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AirAsia's chief growth and platform officer, Ravi Shankar, has stepped down after close to five years with the company. He first joined the team in 2017 as group head of digital marketing before rising through the ranks and eventually helming the role of chief growth and digital officer. Shankar (pictured) told A+M that he is currently on a break and in India, and will decide on his next move soon.

One of his most memorable campaigns in AirAsia included building an in-house digital marketing team from scratch including an in-house programmatic trading desk. According to him, the team had a mix of data, tech and marketing professionals. "This was during the time when the whole industry was complaining that there was not enough digital talent in the region," he said.

Meanwhile, his most memorable campaign was when the team wholly automated AirAsia's search marketing on Google before the days of its super app ambitions. Shankar explained that the search campaigns were automatically launched without any human intervention. "If a route is not performing to the business targets, the system detects that and campaign goes live. Even the text creative, targeting, and bidding, everything is automated. We called it real-time campaigns. This was a true 360 campaign where data, marketing and tech came together," he explained.

Before AirAsia, Shankar was regional head of performance and analytics at Lion & Lion based in Malaysia for two years. Prior to moving to Malaysia, Shankar was based in India and helmed the role of campaign management lead at Google for close to two years. During his time there, he was responsible for helping his clients scale their media buying and improve their digital marketing performance by leveraging products within the DoubleClick platforms, his LinkedIn said. He also worked as an online marketing specialist at Sulekha.com and creative strategist at Yahoo.

His biggest lesson having worked at AirAsia was that it is essential to establish a good culture within the company. "I absolutely fell in love with the culture and how it's an integral part of the business. The way employees came together and transformed the company was terrific. Because of the same culture, I could quickly pivot the digital marketing team to a growth-centric team aligning with the direction of the business," he explained. A+M has reached out to AirAsia for comment.

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