YoungGuns Class Of 2023: Initiative’s Aarathi Bhat and Anjali Nand Kumar

As the senior vice president at Initiative India, Aarathi Bhat has worked across a wide spectrum of categories ranging from high end luxury boutiques to mass FMCG brands. She currently leads the account for e-commerce giant and subscription video on demand player Amazon and Prime Video. Five and a half years into her current role, she has won over 70 awards on the brand and brought over 15 awards for work done in 2023 alone.

Bhat’s colleague Anjali Nand Kumar is a seasoned media professional with over a decade of experience spearheading marquee initiatives. As the general manager - business at Initiative India, she has successfully overseen accounts for renowned brands like Amazon, OnePlus, and Wipro.

The agency’s campaign #AskAlexa, which Kumar was a part of, tailored a campaign, using music, news, and information that millennials craved, for smart speaker Echo’s voice assistant Alexa. On YouTube, they launched a contextual pre-roll campaign introducing Alexa before playing users' favourite songs. This strategy extended to radio, where Alexa co-hosted a show on Radio One, becoming India's first voice-assisted RJ. The result was a remarkable 1.5x growth in total awareness scores, establishing the Echo as a category leader with 59 percent market share. Additionally, Alexa's "skills" awareness increased by 1.4x.

Beyond her professional achievements, she is an ardent film enthusiast, a connoisseur of boba tea, and finds her inspiration in political satire.

About YoungGuns

Storyboard18 is bullish on India’s creative industry and the talent putting it on the map. To kick off our campaign to fuel the industry further, we’ve launched YoungGuns, an initiative to celebrate new ideas, bright talent, fearless creativity and an exciting future. It’s critical to recognize, celebrate, encourage and support young, brave and bold brand makers if we want to propel the industry forward. YoungGuns is an annual recognition program that puts creativity and talent back in the spotlight.

Here’s how we did it

Storyboard18's YoungGuns is a celebration of talent - future-ready young professionals in advertising and marketing who are driving businesses and brands forward and bringing glory to India globally. YoungGuns - Class of 2023 was put together by our editorial teams through a selection process based on work/campaigns that have won global, Indian and regional awards in the past two years, giving India even greater creative clout the world over and setting a benchmark for the industry.

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