Regional Expansion
India and the Maldives both opened in the same year. India alone reached $15M+ in sales within twelve months — while five other markets kept running without interruption.
Joshua Adhikari
Regional Director, South Asia — AdTech & Commercial Growth
The markets I'm proudest of are the ones that don't need me anymore.
Twelve years across South Asia taught me the fastest deal is rarely the one worth chasing. Trust takes longer to build. It also lasts longer.
Dhaka, Bangladesh
12+
Years Leading Digital Growth
4
South Asian Markets
Hundreds
Enterprise Brands
Thousands
Successful Campaigns Delivered
About
Why I do this work.
I didn't set out to build a career in advertising. I studied marketing because I was curious why people make the decisions they make. Advertising was where that curiosity could actually be used.
What kept me there wasn't the industry itself. It was the moment, in the mid-2010s, when advertising stopped being a creative business and became a technology one. Data, platforms, programmatic buying — the rules were being rewritten, and nobody in this region had worked them out yet. That gap felt less like a risk and more like an invitation.
I moved into leadership almost by accident. The first time I was responsible for a team, I assumed the job was about having the best answers. It wasn't. It was about building conditions where other people could find their own — setting a clear standard, then getting out of the way. I've been chasing that feeling ever since: watching someone you've mentored outgrow the role you hired them for.
What motivates me now has less to do with the next deal and more to do with the next decade. South Asia's advertising industry is still being built, market by market — and that's the part I still find interesting. Not optimizing something that's already finished. Helping build something that isn't yet.
The principles haven't changed much over the years. Make the decision the data can defend, not the one that's easiest to justify in a meeting. Build the relationship before you need it. Stay curious enough to be the least experienced person in the room about where the industry is heading. Stop being that person, and you stop being useful.
I've never measured a market by how quickly I could win it. I've measured it by whether I left it better organized than I found it.
Selected impact
A few numbers, for anyone who wants them.
Commercial Growth
$22M+ in regional revenue in the 2021–22 fiscal year, on the back of 60% sales growth and a 15% profitability gain across Bangladesh and Nepal the year before.
Strategic Partnerships
GroupM, Nestlé, Telenor, Disney, Nike, Volvo, Coca-Cola, IKEA, P&G — partnerships that have outlasted three employers and twelve years.
Product Launches
Eskimi's programmatic and AI-powered products went into India and the Maldives for the first time — new ground for the platform, and immediate revenue for the business.
Leadership
A 97-person organization spanning sales, ad operations, HR, finance and engineering — large enough to run seven markets without a single point of failure.
Innovation
AI-powered buying and automated workflows replaced work that used to be done by hand, across all seven markets.
Career journey
How running one market turned into running seven.
2014 — 2017
Chapter 01Earning a seat at the table
- Business Challenge
- A regional operator with no established track record, trying to earn time with Fortune 500 marketers and global network agencies.
- My Contribution
- Delivered on the unglamorous work first — flawless campaign execution for Volvo, Coca-Cola, IKEA and P&G — then used that track record to open doors at GroupM, Disney and Nike.
- Business Outcome
- The relationships and delivery standards from these years became the credibility everything after was built on.
Leadership Lesson
Trust is earned client by client. It is never created by a pitch deck.
2018 — 2020
Chapter 02Building Bangladesh from the ground up
- Business Challenge
- Eskimi had no meaningful commercial presence in Bangladesh's advertising market.
- My Contribution
- Started with three relationships worth building properly — GroupM, Nestlé and Telenor — then earned the mandate to run the country's commercial strategy.
- Business Outcome
- Bangladesh became the template: proof that the model could work, market by market.
Leadership Lesson
Growth starts with a handful of the right relationships, not many average ones.
2020 — 2021
Chapter 03Proving the model works twice
- Business Challenge
- Making what worked in Bangladesh work again in Nepal, without losing quality along the way.
- My Contribution
- Ran Bangladesh and Nepal to the same standard, rather than treating Nepal as a fresh start.
- Business Outcome
- 60% sales growth and a 15% improvement in profitability across both countries — the template held.
Leadership Lesson
A repeatable operating model matters more than reinventing it for every market.
2021 — Present
Chapter 04Scaling a region
- Business Challenge
- Opening two new markets while holding five others steady, without losing control.
- My Contribution
- Opened India and the Maldives without pulling focus from the other five markets, by building a 97-person organization that could run without me in every room.
- Business Outcome
- $22M+ in regional revenue in the 2021–22 fiscal year, including $15M+ from India in its first twelve months — the same template, now running across seven markets.
Leadership Lesson
The ceiling on growth is almost always leadership capacity, not market size.
Leadership philosophy
Why I Lead the Way I Do.
01
Think Long Term
Every market rewards the leader who can hit this quarter's number. Far fewer reward the one who can still explain, five years later, why the business actually grew.
In practice — I try to make the decision I'd still defend in five years — not just the one that looks best in Monday's report.
02
Build Relationships Before Revenue
A signed contract tells you what a partner will do this year. A relationship tells you what they'll do the year it becomes inconvenient.
In practice — Twelve years in, it's the second one that has actually paid the bills.
03
Stay the Least Experienced Person in the Room
The fastest way to become irrelevant in this industry is to be certain about it. Advertising has rewritten its own rules more than once in my career, and it isn't finished.
In practice — So I try to stay the least experienced person in every conversation about where it's heading next.
04
Leaders Build Leaders
A team that only performs when I'm in the room isn't a team I've built well — it's a bottleneck with my name on it. The real measure of leadership isn't what you accomplish yourself.
In practice — It's what still runs, and runs well, the day you step out of the room.
05
It's Not About the Technology
It's easy to get seduced by what a platform can do and forget to ask who it's actually helping. The most impressive demo and the most useful product are rarely the same thing.
In practice — The technology I've backed hardest was the kind that quietly removed a real problem from someone's day.
06
Revenue Without Value Is a Loan
Revenue you take without giving value back is a loan against the future, and the market always calls it in eventually. The partnerships I trust most are the ones still running a decade later.
In practice — That only happens when the other side got at least as much out of it as we did.
Expertise
Built over twelve years. Not claimed overnight.
Commercial Strategy & Growth
Twelve years of owning full P&L across seven markets taught me that growth strategy isn't a slide deck — it's a series of pricing, resourcing and prioritization calls made under pressure, repeated until they compound.
Commercial Strategy · Revenue Growth · Go-To-Market Strategy
Technology & Digital Transformation
Advertising has changed its underlying technology more than once during my career — from direct sales, to programmatic, to AI-driven buying. Staying useful meant treating each shift as a capability to build, not a trend to wait out.
Programmatic Advertising · Artificial Intelligence · Digital Transformation
Leadership & Team Building
Leading a 97-person organization across seven countries only works if the people closest to each market can make good decisions without me. That's built by hiring well and setting a clear standard — not by title.
Executive Leadership · Team Building
Partnerships & Business Development
The relationships I've built — with agencies like GroupM and brands from Nestlé to Coca-Cola — were never won on price. They were earned by being the partner who was still useful after the contract was signed.
Business Development · Strategic Partnerships
Speaking
Speaking From the Work, Not About It.
2
Universities
500+
Professionals Trained
5
Countries Reached
Joshua Prottoy Adhikari
Regional Director, South Asia
The topics come directly from the work: commercial leadership in emerging markets, the shift from traditional to programmatic and AI-driven advertising, and what it actually takes to build a regional organization that can scale.
I enjoy it because teaching forces precision — you can't hide behind a strategy you can't explain clearly to a room of people who will ask the obvious question you've been avoiding.
Audiences leave with fewer slogans and more decisions they can actually use — the kind of operating judgment that usually only gets shared inside a company, not from a stage.
I'm also still a student of the subject myself — recent coursework in applied AI at the University of Helsinki keeps that honest.
Guest Lecturer
Department of Marketing, University of Dhaka, and North South University.
Executive Workshops
Training for 500+ brand managers, media planners and marketing leaders across South Asia's leading agencies and enterprise brands.
Regional Speaker
Programmatic advertising and AI in marketing, presented across India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Insights
Featured Articles
New writing, published each quarter.
The Future of Commercial Leadership
Why the next generation of executives will be defined by judgment, not job titles.
AI Will Change Marketing Faster Than We Think
The tools are moving faster than the strategies built around them.
Why Trust Matters More Than Technology
Platforms change every few years. Relationships compound over a career.
Building Teams That Scale
The hardest part of growth was never the market. It was the org chart.
Context Is Becoming The New Competitive Advantage
In a world of infinite data, understanding still has to come from somewhere.
Looking Forward
What I'm Building
The work ahead looks different from the work behind me. These are the places getting my attention right now — not finished stories, just the ones still being written.
01 — AI
Learning how AI changes the practice of advertising, not just its tools — right now, that means an applied AI course I'm taking.
02 — Leadership
Building leadership capacity across the region, so growth stops depending on any one person in any one room.
03 — Digital Growth
Pushing further into markets where digital advertising infrastructure is still being built, not simply optimized.
04 — Commercial Strategy
Sharpening the operating model that has worked across seven markets, so it holds for the next ten.
05 — Mentoring
Investing time in the people who will run these markets after I've moved on to the next one.
06 — Technology
Staying close to the platforms reshaping programmatic buying, before they reshape the business around them.
07 — Future of Marketing
Thinking harder about what marketing looks like once AI handles the optimizing and people handle the judging.
Contact
Tell Me What You're Building.
I like hearing from people building something in South Asia's advertising and technology space — a leadership opportunity, a stage to speak from, or just an idea worth saying out loud.
Email Me Directly
No forms, no assistants — I read and reply to every message myself.