Sociomantic Labs ropes in Prasanna Iyer from Times Internet as commercial director for India

Berlin-headquartered Sociomantic Labs, a programmatic display advertising solutions provider, has appointed Prasanna Iyer as its commercial director for India. In his new role, Iyer will be responsible for driving the company's revenues in India and for building out its Mumbai-based sales & services teams. He will report to Rohit Kumar, Sociomantic's managing director for the Asia-Pacific region.

"We are happy to welcome someone of Iyer's experience as head of the Sociomantic India team. His expertise in digital coupled with his sell-side understanding of the needs of India's advertisers in a rapidly changing industry will prove indispensable as we develop our existing client relationships and continue expanding our customer base," said Kumar.

"The Indian marketplace is a digital giant, and one that is at a tipping point when it comes to the growth of programmatic. I'm positive about the company's vision for growth, the global leadership and the technology that will enable us to deliver real-time value for Indian marketers," added Iyer.

Iyer has over 12 years of work experience, and joins Sociomantic from Times Internet Ltd, the internet & mobile venture of Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd, where he served dual roles as head of operations and general manager for advertising technology. With regards to programmatic advertising, he was responsible for helping the group to advance its adoption of programmatic advertising technologies.

Prior to Times Internet, he was group manager- client operations at PubMatic Inc., a California-headquartered digital advertising solutions firm, with offices in India, Europe and Australia. He had earlier also worked at companies like Searce Logistics and Analytics LLP, Adventity, and Wipro BPO. He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) degree from AIEM institute.

Set up in 2009, Sociomantic Labs provides programmatic display advertising solutions for online, mobile and social. The company's proprietary 'Streaming CRM' technology allows advertisers to harness the value of their customer relationship management (CRM) and other first-party data assets to deliver individually personalised, dynamic ads for the full funnel.

In April last year, dunnhumby Ltd, a leading customer science company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesco PLC, had acquired Sociomantic Labs. The financials of the deal remain undisclosed. According to the company, in the past twelve months, it has launched operations in Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Czech Republic, and Taiwan, bringing its global presence to 21 offices serving advertisers in over 70 countries worldwide. The current team size is over 250 employees.