Kartik Sharma Named Media Agency Head Of The Year At IAA Leadership Awards
Kartik Sharma, Chief Executive Officer of Omnicom Media India, has been named Media Agency Head of the Year at the IAA Leadership Awards, the media honour at an evening that also recognised leaders from business and creative.
- Award: Media Agency Head of the Year, IAA Leadership Awards 2026
- Host: International Advertising Association, India Chapter, thirteenth edition
- Held: 7 August 2026 in Mumbai, before more than 250 leaders
- Also honoured: Dilip Shanghvi, Babita Baruah and Jayen Mehta
Three Decades, And A Business Being Rebuilt
Sharma has spent more than thirty years in the industry, and the citation points less at a single year than at a direction of travel: an integrated approach to a media business that has grown more connected and more complicated at the same time.
That is the harder problem in media right now. Planning, buying, data, commerce and content used to sit in separate practices with separate profit lines, and clients increasingly refuse to buy them that way. Bringing global capability together with local market knowledge is easy to say in a citation and difficult to do inside a holding company.
The Company It Keeps
The awards spread across disciplines rather than sitting inside advertising alone. Dilip Shanghvi, Babita Baruah and Jayen Mehta were among the other honourees, which places the media award alongside recognition from pharmaceuticals, creative agency leadership and the cooperative sector.
For a media agency chief, that framing is the point. Media leadership is rarely visible outside the trade, and an award that puts it on the same stage as business and creative leadership is an argument about where the discipline sits.
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