dentsu Malaysia hires big industry names to strengthen positioning

Dentsu Malaysia has named Hemanth Jayaraman as partner and agency brand lead of dentsu X, Asha Nair as MD of media investment and platforms and Jing-Wen Foo as eCommerce director. Jayaraman (pictured centre) will be joining from Moët Hennessy Diageo Malaysia and has been with the company since 2019 as senior brand manager for Hennessy VS and Hennessy VSOP brand. He returns to the adland after close to a decade on the brand side working with Moët Hennessy Diageo Malaysia, Pepsico, and Diageo.

At PepsiCo Malaysia, he drove volume and share growth for Lipton Iced Tea and oversaw the brand growth strategy for Tropicana juice brands for eight APAC markets. He previously also worked at Leo Burnett and founded Sw1tch Strategies. Sw1tch Strategies worked with brands such as Audi, Lamborghini, UOB, Hong Leong, and Johnnie Walker Malaysia.

Meanwhile, Nair, who was previously MD of Xaxis and INCA in Malaysia, will now be responsible for managing client media investments, trading and platform activation across offline and online channels for the entire media service line. She has over 20 years of media solutions expertise in digital marketing and advertising. At Xaxis and INCA, she led the growth of AI-powered programmatic and content marketing solutions for GroupM Malaysia. Prior to that, her roles included head of interaction at MediaCom Malaysia and digital lead in Starcom Malaysia. According to dentsu, Nair has driven results for clients such as Mars Food, P&G, Fonterra, Danone, Telekom Malaysia, Volvo, Nespresso, Galderma, Hawley & Hazel, and Subway. 

At the same time, Foo (pictured right) joins dentsu from Shopee and Shopback, where she consistently drove growth for more than ten consumer product verticals by using advanced technology to make online shopping experiences delightful. In her new role as eCommerce director, Foo will be scaling and growing dentsu's end-to-end eCommerce capabilities across marketplace and direct-to-consumer commerce.

All three will report to Dheeraj Raina, CEO of media brands and are part of the media service line executive committee. The move comes as part of the evolution of dentsu's recent rebranding and transformed organisational design. Raina said: "We are building a technical and data-driven marketing spine that goes end-to-end in our business that will chart new frontiers in our industry. I am excited that Nair, Foo and Jayaraman will join me in unpacking all our dynamic, data-driven tech-enabled media capabilities towards meaningful progress for clients."

The agency bagged media duties for Resorts World Genting in April this year, and will work with the brand until the end of 2022. Meanwhile in March, the agency also witnessed another leadership change when it folded Lemonade into Isobar and named Lemonade's MD Ruhana DaSilva to lead the newly expanded team. She now reports to CEO Tan Kien Eng.

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