A post-graduate in Business Management from XLRI, Sankara Pillai started his career in Market Research at IMRB in 1984. He spent 8 years with IMRB specialising in Media and Communications and Consumer research. During this period he was instrumental in setting up TRP, India's first continuous study to track viewership. He was also involved in NRS III and was in charge of Businessmen's Readership Survey (BRS).

He has presented and published several papers including "Impact of Clutter on TV Viewership - An Indian Experiment" which was published by Journal of Market Research Society of Great Britain and "Data fusion: An Experiment to merge TV and Press Databases" which was presented at World Readership Symposium at Hong Kong in 1991. After leaving IMRB in 1992, he worked for 6 years as an Economic Consultant to Morgan Stanley Asset Management. He joined ORG-MARG in 1998.