Yahoo! India R&D, today announced the appointment of Ram Narayanan as VP, Product Management, Marketing Products Division (MPD). He would be responsible globally for building platforms and products aimed at enabling advertisers to have different customized advertising options. Prior to joining Yahoo! India R&D, Ram was the Head of Unlimited Potential Group at Microsoft India.

Ram will be based out of Bangalore, India and will report locally to Sharad Sharma, CEO, Yahoo! India Research & Development and functionally to Mark Morrissey, SVP, Product Management, MPD, Yahoo! Inc.

He will be working closely with Shouvick Mukherjee, a Yahoo! veteran, who has recently been given the responsibility of VP, Engineering for the MPD. These appointments are in line with the new initiative at Yahoo! India to create a CoE (Centre of Excellence) for Mass Market Advertisement (MMA) in Bangalore.

“I am delighted to welcome Ram on board. He brings with him rich experience in the area of product development and management. His involvement across our cutting edge product groups will ensure that key elements of product development and management would be driven out of Yahoo! India and position us as a ‘must-buy’ for advertisers by ensuring the most effective and easiest marketing solutions.” said Sharad Sharma, CEO Yahoo! India Research & Development.” 

“This appointment further demonstrates Yahoo!’s commitment to recruiting world class talent in India” he added.

Both Ram and Shouvick will drive the creation of the next generation of Mass Market Advertiser products for Yahoo!  and create value for the MMA CoE. The MMA CoE will help drive self-serve solutions for advertisers and agencies and the main focus of the team will be to provide small advertisers with a simple advertising platform that drive greater value to their businesses.

This group will offer a unified experience and optimization in buying Search, Display (graphical and text), Mobile, Video and other ads while providing the user with a great experience within each type of ad format and distribution modality. This CoE will focus on segments of advertisers that include Search Marketing, Small Businesses and Local Services.

“It is truly an exciting time to be at Yahoo!, which is a world-renowned, pure play Internet brand that offers the best products on the online-advertising space as well as mobile. I look forward to building out the product management function in India for Mass Market Advertisers,” said Ram

Prior to joining Yahoo! India R&D, Ram worked with Microsoft Corp. in India as well as Redmond, WA from 2000. He was the Business Manager and Technical advisor to Chairman, Microsoft India and the founder of the High Performance Computing Group. From 1992 to 2000, Ram was responsible for founding two companies called Innosol Inc. and Engineering Dynamics Inc. in Michigan delivering engineering software and services to the automotive industry.

Ram has a MBA degree and a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Rackham School of Graduate Studies. 

Sourced From: Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide