Starcom promotes Resham Manaktala to associate vice president

GURGAONResham Manaktala has just been handed a bigger seat at the table. Starcom India has promoted her to associate vice president, strategy, a step up that comes barely a year and a half after she joined the agency as senior director. For an industry that runs on pitches, data and relentless client pressure, this is no small vote of confidence, and it caps a career built almost entirely on the unglamorous but essential craft of market research.

Manaktala’s CV reads like a masterclass in analytical rigour. Over ten years she has moved through Nielsen, Kantar’s Worldpanel division, NielsenIQ and EssenceMediacom before landing at Starcom, picking up expertise in marketing mix modelling, consumer behaviour and retail measurement along the way. Her time at Nielsen alone spanned five years and seven months, rising from analyst to manager, marketing mix, a grounding that gave her the statistical backbone now prized by every media agency chasing accountability from FMCG clients. The subsequent four years at Worldpanel by Kantar, culminating in a stint as senior account director, sharpened her client-facing instincts before she crossed over to the agency side proper.

What makes the promotion notable is the speed of her ascent within Starcom itself. She joined as senior director, strategy in February 2025 and was elevated to the top job within eighteen months, a timeline that suggests she has been doing rather more than keeping seats warm. Her own account of the past year, of complex business challenges, high-energy pitches and being pushed to think bigger, hints at an agency using her analytical toolkit to win and retain business in a category, FMCG, where margins are thin and marketing spend is scrutinised line by line.

Manaktala’s PGDM from Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management, with a focus on marketing and finance, underpins a career that blends hard data with commercial nous, a combination increasingly rare and increasingly valuable as clients demand proof that every rupee and dollar of ad spend is working. Expect her new mandate at Starcom to lean heavily on category growth drivers, market share analysis and marketing mix modelling, the same toolkit that has carried her from summer intern at Synovate to the associate vice president’s office in a little over 15 years.