Starcom Promotes Resham Manaktala To Associate Vice President

Resham Manaktala, associate vice president for strategy at Starcom India

Starcom India has promoted Resham Manaktala to associate vice president, strategy, eighteen months after she joined the agency as senior director.

Promotion: associate vice president, strategy, Starcom India
Joined: February 2025 as senior director, strategy
Experience: over ten years across Nielsen, Kantar's Worldpanel division, NielsenIQ and EssenceMediacom
Specialisms: marketing mix modelling, consumer behaviour, retail measurement
Education: PGDM from the Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute

The Career Resham Manaktala Has Built

This is a research career that arrived at an agency, rather than an agency career that picked up some numbers along the way, and the distinction matters.

Five years and seven months at Nielsen, rising from analyst to manager, marketing mix. Four years at Worldpanel by Kantar, ending as senior account director. Then NielsenIQ and EssenceMediacom before Starcom. That is a decade spent almost entirely in measurement, in roles where the output is a defensible number rather than a persuasive deck.

Why Media Agencies Now Compete For This Profile

Media agencies have spent years promising accountability to clients who have become progressively less willing to accept reach as a proxy for effect. FMCG in particular runs on thin margins and scrutinises marketing spend line by line, and the conversation in those reviews has moved from what was bought to what it did.

Answering that requires marketing mix modelling and someone who genuinely understands its limits as well as its outputs. An agency without that capability is arguing from conviction. An agency with it is arguing from evidence, which is a materially stronger position when the client's finance function is in the room.

The Speed Is The Story

Eighteen months from senior director to associate vice president is quick in a structure where promotion cycles are usually longer and more crowded.

Manaktala's own account of the period points at complex business challenges, high-energy pitches and being pushed to think bigger. Read commercially, that describes an analytical toolkit being used at the front of the business rather than in the back office, on new business and on retention, which is where promotions of this speed usually come from.

What It Signals About The Strategy Function

There was a time when media strategy meant the person who framed the audience and wrote the rationale. The function has shifted underneath that description, and elevating someone whose grounding is retail measurement and modelling is a fairly direct statement about which version of strategy the agency is investing in.