Regional Expansion
India opened that year, reaching $15M+ in sales within twelve months — while five other markets kept running without interruption.
Joshua Adhikari
Regional Director, South Asia — Eskimi
The markets I'm proudest of are the ones that don't need me anymore.
Twelve years across Europe, APAC and 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
6
Markets Across the Region
Hundreds
Enterprise Brands
Thousands
Successful Campaigns Delivered
About
Why I do this work.
I didn't set out to build a career in advertising. School took me through St. Joseph Higher Secondary School and Notre Dame College in Dhaka, then a business degree at St. Xavier's College in Kolkata — where I first 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 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 six 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 six markets.
Career journey
How running one market turned into running six.
2014 — 2016
Widespace
Learning campaign strategy inside a mature market
Campaign Manager, Europe
- Business Challenge
- European advertisers and agencies operated inside one of the most mature, data-driven digital advertising markets in the world — a different bar for campaign strategy and performance than most of the industry had reached yet.
- My Contribution
- Managed campaign strategy and execution for global consumer brands including Volvo, Coca-Cola, IKEA and P&G, across markets spanning Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, Finland and the United Kingdom.
- Business Outcome
- The role built a working foundation in programmatic advertising, campaign optimisation and performance measurement — and a first-hand sense of what enterprise clients and mature ecosystems actually expect.
Leadership Lesson
You learn the real standard for a discipline by working inside the market that set it. Everything afterward gets measured against that bar.
2016 — 2017
Targetoo
From opening markets to leading one
Business Development Manager, APAC → Country Head, Bangladesh
- Business Challenge
- Introducing programmatic advertising into markets where the category was still new to most advertisers and agencies — Bangladesh and APAC markets including Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia.
- My Contribution
- Onboarded and managed major clients including GroupM, Disney and Nike, and built the agency and advertiser relationships needed to introduce programmatic into new markets. That track record led to a promotion to Country Head, Bangladesh, with direct responsibility for the market.
- Business Outcome
- The progression — from opening markets across a region to leading one of them directly — was the first evidence that business development could turn into market leadership.
Leadership Lesson
Opening a market and running one call for different instincts. Doing both, in sequence, is how you find out which one you're actually built for.
2018 — 2021
Eskimi
Building Bangladesh, then Nepal, to the same standard
Business Development Manager, Bangladesh → Country Manager, Bangladesh → Country Manager, Bangladesh & Nepal
- Business Challenge
- Eskimi had no meaningful commercial presence in Bangladesh, and no track record yet to build one.
- My Contribution
- Starting as Business Development Manager, secured strategic partnerships with GroupM, Nestlé and Telenor and grew enterprise revenue in the market — then took on full P&L ownership as Country Manager, Bangladesh, before extending the same operating model to Nepal as Country Manager, Bangladesh & Nepal.
- Business Outcome
- Running both countries to one standard, rather than treating Nepal as a fresh start, delivered 60% sales growth and a 15% improvement in profitability across the two markets.
Leadership Lesson
A repeatable operating model matters more than reinventing it for every market.
2021 — 2023
Eskimi
Scaling from two countries to a region
Regional Growth Manager, South Asia
- Business Challenge
- Opening a new, highly contested market — India — while strengthening commercial operations across five others, without losing control of any of them.
- My Contribution
- Led the expansion into India and managed regional P&L and profitability across Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Pakistan and India, building a team of 97 across Country Managers and functional departments.
- Business Outcome
- India delivered $15M+ in sales within its first year, contributing to $22M+ in regional revenue in the 2021–22 fiscal year.
Leadership Lesson
The ceiling on regional growth is almost always leadership capacity, not market size.
2023 — Present
PresentEskimi
Leading the region, not just growing it
Regional Director, South Asia
- Business Challenge
- Moving from scaling a region to running it — where the job is less about opening the next market and more about the discipline, systems and relationships that keep six of them performing at once.
- My Contribution
- Leads commercial strategy and P&L across six markets — Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan — working cross-functionally with Sales, Ad Operations, Product, Engineering, Finance and HR, and presenting regional performance and strategy directly to executive leadership.
- Business Outcome
- The mandate now sits closer to pricing and margin discipline, enterprise partnerships and building the next layer of leadership than to any single deal.
Leadership Lesson
The work changes at every stage of scale. What got a market built isn't what keeps a region running.
Selected Work
Four stories, in more depth than the numbers allow.
The Career Journey above is the timeline. These are the same stories, unpacked properly.
01
Opening India
- Challenge
- India was one of the fastest-growing digital advertising markets in the world, and one of the most contested. Global platforms were entrenched, agency relationships ran a decade deep, and advertisers wanted measurable outcomes, not another buying platform. The real question wasn't whether India was worth entering — it was how to earn trust in a market where technology alone doesn't buy credibility.
- Approach
- Rather than importing the playbook that worked elsewhere, I spent time first understanding how decisions actually got made — agency structures, advertiser priorities, competitive positioning. That led to a deliberate trade: build senior relationships and a repeatable commercial framework before chasing short-term revenue, and sell the business outcome, not the platform's features.
- Outcome
- The approach delivered $15M+ in sales from India within the first twelve months and became part of the broader South Asia growth strategy — not by increasing sales activity, but by building the kind of trust that supports expansion built to last.
- Leadership Lesson
- Commercial leadership isn't really about entering a new geography. It's about reducing uncertainty for the customer — technology opens the door, but trust is what keeps you in the room.
02
Building Bangladesh from zero
- Challenge
- When Eskimi entered Bangladesh, programmatic advertising was virtually unknown. The digital advertising ecosystem ran on Facebook, YouTube, Google Ads, direct publisher buying and a handful of local ad networks — agencies and brand teams had no real frame of reference for a demand-side platform. The task wasn't winning clients. It was introducing a technology category the market didn't yet know it needed, and the same gap existed just as widely in Nepal and Sri Lanka.
- Approach
- I led the commercial introduction of programmatic advertising across all three markets, and treated it as an education problem before a sales one. That meant running workshops and presentations, sitting with agency and brand teams to explain how a DSP differs from direct buying, and demonstrating what audience-based buying, data and measurement actually made possible. Commercial discussions came last — only once the relationship, and the concept itself, had earned enough trust to support them.
- Outcome
- Bangladesh became one of Eskimi's strongest markets in South Asia. The more significant shift sat upstream of the revenue: the market moved from near-zero awareness of programmatic buying to actively running DSP campaigns. The commercial framework and go-to-market approach built there became the template Eskimi later used to enter other markets still waiting to be introduced to the category.
- Leadership Lesson
- Markets aren't always waiting for the innovation you're bringing them. Sometimes leadership means creating the market before you can grow inside it — and technology adoption starts with education, trust and patience, not a sales pitch.
03
Building a Scalable Organization
- Challenge
- Scaling a business is not simply a matter of hiring more people. Every hire is an investment made before the business has fully realized the return — and recruitment has its own lead time, followed by months of onboarding and training before someone reaches full productivity. That creates a persistent dilemma: invest in people ahead of growth and carry the cost and risk, or wait for growth to arrive and let execution slow under pressure on the existing team. Workforce planning has to anticipate the business's future needs, not react to its current ones.
- Approach
- I treated organizational scaling as a business planning exercise, not a recruitment exercise. Every hiring decision started from the same inputs — market opportunity, commercial forecasts, team capacity, operational bottlenecks and expected workload — so that recruitment lead times could be set against where the business was going, not where it already stood. Selection mattered as much as timing: the goal was people who would perform inside the culture and contribute beyond their job description, not simply fill an open seat. The target was always a team built for sustainable regional growth, not a headcount number.
- Outcome
- The organization scaled to roughly 97 people while holding operational stability and supporting continued commercial expansion. That growth didn't come from treating recruitment as a reactive process — it came from planning workforce needs alongside business strategy closely enough to build capability ahead of demand, without losing the cohesion or execution quality of the team already in place.
- Leadership Lesson
- People are not costs to be managed. They are long-term investments that determine whether a strategy can actually be executed. Successful scaling comes down to forecasting, timing and hiring with intent — and building an organization where people can grow alongside the business. The strongest organizations prepare for tomorrow's opportunities before they become today's constraints.
04
Team building beyond the org chart
- Challenge
- An org chart tells you who reports to whom. It doesn't tell you who can actually lead, present, create or hold a team together under pressure — and there's no way to find that out inside the normal rhythm of office work.
- Approach
- During a team-building exercise for the Eskimi Bangladesh team in Cox's Bazar, we split into three teams — Alpha, Bravo and Charlie — each with a nominated team lead who wasn't a manager. Across a mix of sightseeing, a story-completion exercise, a spaghetti-and-marshmallow tower, an island survival challenge and a team presentation built with nothing more than art paper and markers, the point was never the activities themselves. It was watching how people led, participated, collaborated and solved problems once the usual job titles stopped applying.
- Outcome
- The org chart turned out to be an incomplete map. Several people showed leadership, presentation ability, creativity or collaboration well beyond what their day-to-day role would suggest — capabilities that simply hadn't had a reason to surface before. The exercises also surfaced genuine areas to work on across the group, particularly instruction-following, discipline and time management, in a lower-stakes setting than a live campaign or a client deadline.
- Leadership Lesson
- An org chart tells you someone's position. It doesn't tell you everything that person is capable of doing.
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 in AdTech — including P&L ownership across six 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 six 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
Continuous Learning
Still a student of the subject.
Leadership requires continuous learning. Technology evolves constantly, and staying relevant means investing time in learning — not only new tools, but new ways of thinking.
University of Helsinki & MinnaLearn
September 2025Elements of AI
An internationally recognized introduction to artificial intelligence — covering machine learning, neural networks, AI ethics and practical business applications.
View CertificateUniversity of Helsinki & MinnaLearn
September 2025Building AI
Focused on identifying business opportunities for AI, evaluating AI use cases, and designing AI-enabled solutions for practical implementation within organizations.
View CertificateEskimi
March 2025Brand Advertising Certificate
The Online Marketing Fundamentals
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 — I completed applied AI coursework at the University of Helsinki in 2025, and keep adding to it.
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.
Featured Talk
Hear It, Not Just Read It.
ads!podcast — Episode 001
A Conversation on Programmatic Advertising
A 40-minute conversation on how programmatic advertising actually works in South Asia's emerging markets — recorded as the debut guest episode for ads!podcast.
Watch on YouTubeSelected Thinking
Selected Thinking
Ideas, observations and lessons from building businesses, teams and markets across AdTech and emerging economies.
Selected Writing
Selected Writing
I've been writing about digital marketing, programmatic advertising and commercial leadership since 2019. These articles capture how my thinking has evolved — from explaining the fundamentals of digital advertising to exploring AI, leadership and the future of commercial growth. I don't write often. I write when I believe an idea is worth keeping.
Current Focus
Current Focus
Most of my time right now goes toward four things: helping businesses adopt AI responsibly, building commercial teams that can run without me in the room, creating partnerships built to last, and mentoring the people who'll lead these markets next. Underneath all of it is a simpler question — where can technology actually solve a real business problem, not just look impressive doing it.
Every project I take on is guided by one belief: long-term relationships create long-term value.
01 — AI
Learning how AI changes the practice of advertising, not just its tools — most recently through applied AI coursework at the University of Helsinki.
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 six 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.
Recommendations
Professional Recommendations
Kind words from colleagues, clients and industry leaders I've had the privilege to work with.
“I was very happy with his performance and leadership, and I would not hesitate to rehire him if the opportunity arose.”
“I was particularly impressed by Joshua's leadership skills and his ability to inspire and motivate his colleagues.”
“Joshua is an energetic, positive and dependable manager who consistently pushes for growth and delivers it.”
Ivan Tadic
Entrepreneur
“A true professional with great ambition.”
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.