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Rakesh Bhookya Joins Way2News As Head Of Growth

Ad Tribe! Bureau1 min read
Rakesh Bhookya, head of growth at Way2News, photographed against a flat mint green background

Rakesh Bhookya has joined Way2News as head of growth. Alongside growth for the platform itself, he will work on VedaMandir, a Way2News initiative, and be part of its zero-to-one build.

  • Role: head of growth at Way2News
  • From: Chai Shots, where he was senior manager for growth
  • Earlier: Head Digital Works and Hansa Cequity
  • Experience: over 11 years across acquisition and retention
  • Additional brief: building VedaMandir, an initiative by Way2News, from the start

What Rakesh Bhookya Brings To It

The useful thing in his record is category range rather than tenure. Eleven years across acquisition and retention, spanning performance marketing, branding, loyalty programmes and product marketing, applied in automobiles, gaming and OTT. Those are three businesses with very different retention problems, and a regional news platform has elements of all of them.

The data and analytics side matters more than usual here. Regional news is a high-frequency, low-margin product where growth is won on repeat sessions rather than on installs, and optimising that is closer to gaming retention than to a classic marketing brief.

The Zero To One Part

Announcing the move on LinkedIn, Bhookya described it as a new chapter and pointed at VedaMandir specifically, calling it a new challenge and an opportunity to build. Being handed both an existing platform's growth and a product that does not exist yet is a wide brief, and the two rarely reward the same instincts.

More appointments.

#Regional Media#Rakesh Bhookya#Way2News#Growth Marketing#VedaMandir
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