Suman Layak Promoted To Senior Vice President At Adfactors PR
Suman Layak has been promoted to senior vice president at Adfactors PR, six years after moving from journalism into reputation work.
- Role: senior vice president, Adfactors PR, Mumbai
- Joined: September 2020, as vice president
- Tenure: six years and two months at the agency
- Before: a long career in newspapers and magazines
- Education: master's degree in journalism, University of Calcutta
What The Suman Layak Promotion Recognises
A crossing that comparatively few journalists make, and fewer still build on. Layak joined Adfactors PR as vice president in September 2020 and has described the period since as interesting with some exhilarating moments in it.
The reason the move works is in the skills list rather than the titles: headline writing, business and corporate journalism, magazine and newspaper editing, storytelling, and online content and video. That is a specific toolkit when a client's reputation is in question, because it answers the questions an agency usually has to guess at, namely what makes a story and how an editor will read one.
The Newsroom Years
The career opened as a reporter at The Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd from 1997 to 2000, where Layak started the Enterprise section in Kolkata, writing about entrepreneurs and about technology and non-technology start-ups.
Starting a section is a different experience from filling one. It requires deciding what a beat is for and persuading an organisation to carry it, which is closer to what senior counsel in an agency actually involves than daily reporting is.
Why Agencies Keep Hiring From The Press
Because the central skill of reputation management is predicting how a piece of information will travel, and that is learned faster inside a newsroom than described from outside one.
The limit is equally well known: a journalist who joins an agency has to learn the commercial craft that was never part of the newsroom, from scoping work to running teams against a fee. A promotion six years in is the clearest available evidence that part has been done.
More people moves on Ad Tribe.