Ankit Dhameja steps up as WPP Media’s strategy lead for Google India

GURUGRAM: Ankit Dhameja has landed the job a lot of media people would kill for and a few would quietly fear.

WPP Media has named him senior vice president, strategy, with the Google India brief. His role sits at the awkward junction of business strategy and media strategy. Consumer intelligence, data and the AI wave are part of the same brief. The test is simple. Can he turn a noisy market into a plan that a client will fund and a P&L will feel?

He has been building towards this sort of seat for years. At Deloitte he was lead, technology and media, from January 2020 to June 2026. His job allowed him to mix client tools, insight narratives and thought leadership that had to travel outside the firm: reports, surveys, outlooks, points of view.

He cut the time it took to scan trends and write briefs by putting GenAI on the first draft, then forcing the output through structured checks so the machine did not invent the market. He also ran go-to-market jobs the unglamorous way. Find the fastest segments. Name the buyer. Write a “why now” offer. Make the acquisition motion repeatable.

The media bit was not decorative. He built full-funnel plans across search, social, programmatic, video and CTV, OOH, audio, influencer and partnerships. He sat with sales and subject-matter experts hunting new work. He presented to senior clients and helped pitch for it.

BBC News came before that. From December 2014 to December 2019 he was manager, data and insights, running an APAC and global team that pulled audience, ad-impact and market numbers into stories sales teams could use. The thought-leadership slate included facial recognition, neuroscience and ad impact. The client list ran through media, technology, semiconductor, cloud, telecom, banking, finance and travel.

Network 18 was the earlier proving ground. As deputy manager, research and marketing for CNN IBN and IBN 7, he lived inside TAM, TGI, focus groups and the Indian television schedule. History TV18 moved from fourth to second with research he helped feed. IBN 7’s relaunch added 20 per cent viewership. IBN Lokmat’s reach rose 30 per cent. Before Network 18 he was senior media planner at Mindshare, where the Horlicks Pro Mind launch in the south overshot quarterly targets by 140 per cent and a vacation-time website pulled in a lakh kids and more than 30,000 mothers.

That is the core of this appointment. Forget the sudden gurus. What you have here is a planner who thoroughly learned television, pivoted to data, mastered consulting-grade GTM, and has now been handed the massive Google account at WPP Media. And it’s happening right now, just as AI is completely rewriting consumer behavior and changing how media gets bought.

He has thanked the people who backed him. Fair enough. The next thank-you note will have to come from the assignment. Google does not pay for narratives that sit in a slide. It pays when strategy becomes a decision and the decision becomes growth.