Ankitha Acharya joins WPP Media as global strategy director for Nestlé

LONDON: From sportswear to cars to chocolate, and now to the world’s biggest food company. Ankitha Acharya has joined WPP Media as global strategy director for Nestlé, a role that began in October 2026 and is based in the London area. “I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position,” she said, announcing the move.

Ankitha, who describes herself as global brand strategy director for Nestlé at WPP Media, brings a career spanning diverse markets, industries and cultures. She previously led strategy for adidas across 17 emerging markets. Earlier roles include leading planning and strategy for Volvo across six European markets and heading audience planning for L’Oréal, building experience across both global and local markets. A strong consumer-first mindset sits at the heart of her work, with a deep focus on insight-led strategy and turning a nuanced understanding of people into sharper brand thinking and meaningful growth.

Her philosophy is clear. The career has moved fast and across markets, she says, because she believes the best strategists are shaped by the widest possible range of human experience. She is recognised for being driven, proactive and collaborative, with a particular interest in the intersection of brand, audience and global growth.

Her most recent role was brand strategy director, emerging markets, for adidas at EssenceMediacom in the London area, from April 2025. Before that, from August 2023 to April 2025, she was planning and strategy director, Europe, for Volvo at Mindshare in Greater London. There she led media strategy and planning for Volvo across six EMEA markets: Sweden, France, Poland, Portugal, Ireland and the UK. She developed processes to plan integrated media for new product launches and tactical campaigns, and nurtured senior client relations and cross-functional collaboration to ensure successful project delivery.

Her audience planning credentials were built in Mumbai at Wavemaker, where she spent one year and nine months. She was business director, audience strategy, for L’Oréal from March to July 2023, and before that associate business director, audience strategy, for L’Oréal and Mondelez from November 2021 to March 2023. She designed an audience-first planning strategy, based on brand, market and consumer evaluation, across key L’Oréal brands, including Maybelline, L’Oréal Paris, Garnier, Kérastase and L’Pro, to facilitate portfolio management. She spearheaded consumer understanding and strategy by mining data across sources such as consumer listening, Google Insights Manager, GWI, WARC, e-commerce dashboards and GroupM proprietary tools. She prepared the brands for a cookieless future by creating first-party data collection frameworks covering consumer journeys, value exchanges, data storage and unification, and activation across multiple media channels. She also created audience data blueprints for Mondelez brands using Lytics.

At Performics India, where she spent one year and 11 months, she was senior manager from July to November 2021 and business manager from January 2020 to July 2021, in Mumbai. She handled multiple business product accounts, covering loans and credit cards, for HDFC, India’s largest private sector bank and a leading client. She led a team of four, responsible for complete brand strategy and planning, planned, deployed and measured the use of first-party data along with behavioural signals to achieve maximum relevancy, and managed multi-platform digital performance and branding campaigns, including Festive Treats 2020 and AR Rahman, covering PPC media, publisher media and streaming media.

The early career was just as varied. At Growisto in Mumbai, from May to December 2019, she was associate project manager. She headed and managed the client’s Instagram account, both organic and paid, through research, content brainstorming, execution and impact analysis, led a two-member team of analysts for Facebook, Instagram and influencer marketing campaigns, and created end-to-end influencer marketing processes covering planning, talent negotiations, final execution and evaluation. In April and May 2018, she was a digital marketing intern at Radio Mirchi, where she designed an integrated model for the brand’s online presence to create a cohesive digital identity, proposed a positioning and communication strategy for its media and entertainment offerings online, and conceptualised innovative content in line with the vision of “Mirchi everywhere”. Her career began at Deloitte in Mumbai, where she was an article assistant from October 2014 to February 2016, conducting statutory audits for subsidiaries of the Tata Group of companies.

The analysis is simple. Nestlé’s portfolio spans dozens of categories and nearly every market, and it needs a strategist who can turn consumer insight into brand thinking at scale. An auditor turned digital marketer turned global brand strategist, with stops across fashion, cars, banking and sportswear, brings a rare blend of numbers, data and storytelling. For WPP Media, it is a hire that pairs emerging-market instincts with European planning experience. For Ankitha, it is a bigger global canvas, and a chance to prove that the best strategists really are shaped by the widest possible range of human experience.