MUMBAI: Hotstar has appointed Punitha Arumugam as platform evangelist, with the mandate to showcase the power of the platform to India’s leading brands.

The appointment is amongst Hotstar’s several initiatives to spur an increasing shift in marketing focus towards platforms with high quality content and engaged audiences. 

Hotstar has increasingly raised the pressure on Google and Facebook, especially in an environment where many leading multinational brands have raised questions on the quality and safety of content on open platforms against which their ads are placed.

Hotstar CEO Ajit Mohan said, “Punitha is a leader in digital who has a fantastic track record of having aided the creation of many agency and brand partnerships in India and around the region. Hotstar is a special place for brands. We are delighted that she is coming on board to help us introduce the unique power of Hotstar to marketers around the country.”

Arumugam added, “Hotstar is one of the few video platforms in the world that has tremendous scale, very engaged audiences and remains open to advertisers. I believe the world of marketing is evolving quite rapidly, and Hotstar has the unique ability to marry the scale and engagement of television, with the power of audience understanding that digital brings. This is what brands have been waiting for, and I am delighted to play a role in shaping the next phase of the industry’s evolution.”

Arumugam, a media agency veteran, known for her leadership at Madison Media as group CEO for over 13 years, and at Google as agency director for over five years, is seen as a leader who shaped many agencies’ and marketers’ increasing use of digital platforms for brand building. At Google, she led the organisation’s agency business, first from India and later for the region from Singapore, as managing director, APAC agency for Google APAC. She is currently setting up her own firm in the communications tech space.

Her career spans over 20 years of media. She is widely acknowledged as the driving force behind Madison’s transformation to the second largest media agency in India and is credited for building a buoyant agency business for Google in India and Asia Pacific.

She will be operating from Mumbai for her role at Hotstar.