Network18 elevates Ganesh Iyer to chief marketing officer

NEW DELHI: Network18 is betting big on branded content and intellectual property, and it has just handed the keys to the man it trusts to drive that bet home. Ganesh Iyer, until now chief brand officer, has been elevated to chief marketing officer, a promotion that is as much a statement of intent as it is a reward for work done.

The logic is straightforward. Branded content and IP, in the words of the group’s leadership, is a portfolio with the potential to grow manifold. To realise that promise, Network18 needed someone to sit above the fray, coordinating marketing muscle across a sprawling stable of brands rather than tending to just one corner of it. Iyer, who has spent his time as chief brand officer sharpening and safeguarding the group’s news brands while injecting creative flair into campaigns and branded content, fits that brief neatly.

His new mandate is expansive. Iyer becomes the strategic backbone of Network18’s branded content, IP and marketing agenda, working across business clusters as varied as EBN, ILC, News18 Studio, Firstpost, Moneycontrol, Network18 Connected and Creator18. Marketing heads at each of these brands will now report to him on a dotted line, a structural tweak designed to force collaboration rather than merely encourage it. The aim, unambiguously, is bigger, bolder and better marketing, and by extension, a bigger, bolder and better business.

Iyer will not be doing this alone. A specialised central unit under Sharmistha Gupta, tasked with big new ideas, strategic pitches and brand initiatives across the group, will continue to report to him. So too will the creative and promo teams led by Aman and Sonali, who remain under his supervision. The net effect is a marketing function that is more centralised at the strategic level even as it stays dotted-line connected at the operational one.

The second half of this reshuffle belongs to Mihir Bhatt, who joined Network18 only in April as chief content officer for News18 Studio. Bhatt’s remit has now widened considerably. As chief content officer for branded content, he will steer branded content initiatives across News18 Studio, EBN and ILC, three teams that have not always moved in lockstep. His track record building marquee IPs and finding new revenue lines makes him a logical choice, and he will now support Mitul and Smriti in this expanded capacity, while still reporting to Shiv on the core News18 Studio business.

There is a neat structural symmetry here too. A subset of the central ideation team led by Rahul Thagele will move to sit directly with Bhatt, placing the idea generators alongside the studio that turns those ideas into finished product. That is meant to create a single thread of ownership from concept to execution, and, crucially, to cut down turnaround times, often the biggest drag on branded content businesses trying to move at the speed clients now expect.

Taken together, the changes free Iyer to think and operate at an organisation-wide, strategic altitude, while giving Shiv, Bhatt and the Studios team sharper ownership of the harder yards, turning ideas into revenue. It is a division of labour that looks designed less to reward past performance, though it does that too, and more to remove the friction that typically slows branded content businesses down: too many cooks, too little clarity on who owns what, and ideas that die in the handover between strategy and execution.

Whether the restructuring delivers the manifold growth Network18 is chasing will depend on execution rather than the org chart. But the intent is clear enough: fewer silos, tighter reporting lines, and two trusted lieutenants, Iyer and Bhatt, given the room and the reporting structure to make it happen.