Hariharan Vishwanath has taken up the role of national trading head at Mediaedge:cia. Earlier, he was GM, Maxus, Bengaluru.
The designation of national trading head is a newly formed one at GroupM, wherein all the agencies under its umbrella will have individual trading heads reporting to Prasanth Kumar, overall trading head, GroupM and T Gangadhar, MD, Mediaedge:cia.
Vishwanath has an experience of 15 years in media planning. He began his career with JWT (then HTA) in the media department as a management trainee in 1994. He quit the agency as media director in 2002.
Subsequently, he joined Mindshare as planning director when the agency was launched, and was looking after brands such as IBM and Nike. In 2006, he assumed the role of business director.
In 2007, he moved to Maxus, another agency in the GroupM fold, to take up the larger role of GM at the agency’s Bengaluru branch.
Throughout his career, Vishwanath has been based in Bengaluru. However, this will be his first stint at media buying. Vishwanath said, “Though I have worked a little here and there on media buying, I have solely concentrated on media planning all this while. Stepping into buying this time is a conscious effort”.