Speaker 2023 Archives

Akshay Salaria

Akshay currently leads the Acquisition Growth and MarTech Team at Tata Digital for Tata Neu as Director – Marketing. He is Digital Marketing professional and has worked in-depth across all digital marketing verticals – Growth, Customer Acquisition, CLM/Retention, Performance, MarTech, Media, and Digital Analytics. Was a member of the teams that launched Tata Neu and Zee5.

He has won various awards for marketing campaigns and for MarTech too including a Gold Abby at Goafest.

Akshay has been teaching digital marketing for 5 years at various ed-techs and has given guest lectures at multiple B-Schools on Digital Marketing topics. Has been a member of a jury for a marketing award too.

On the personal front, he is a long-distance runner and considers himself to be beginner percussionist!

Andrew Burke

Andrew Burke is a Sydney-based executive with over 25 years’ experience in growth, technology and marketing intelligence. He is currently Managing Director (APAC and Growth Markets – India, China, Brazil) at leading recommendation and native platform, Outbrain, a role which sees him responsible for forging major partnerships and furthering business development. Andy’s senior roles in the past include management positions at Sensis, Yellow Pages and Next Digital. He is a seasoned executive who effortlessly translates expertise in business technology into agile strategies and has led many teams through digital transformation. In addition to his role at Outbrain, Andrew is a member of the SmartAID Advisory Board, where he focuses on technical partnerships, platforms and media.

Lee Brown

Lee Brown is the VP, Global Head of Advertising Business & Platform at Spotify, the world’s most popular audio streaming platform. He joined Spotify in 2019 and oversees more than 1500 employees in 183 global markets across Sales, Marketing, Advertising Revenue Partnerships, Advertising Operations, Engineering and Product R&D. In his role, Lee utilizes global advertising trends to ensure audio and culture are at the forefront of all of Spotify’s advertising strategies and working for businesses of all sizes. With over 456 million active users, Spotify’s ad revenue plays a formidable role in fueling the engine of the company’s popular Free experience globally.

Prior to joining Spotify, Lee served as Chief Revenue Officer at BuzzFeed, where he led all global Sales, Account Management, Branded Content, Marketing, Business Development, Business Operations, Distribution, and Research. He was also responsible for diversifying the company’s revenue streams and scaling the business globally within the rapidly changing media landscape.

Over the course of his career, Brown has developed rich expertise in the digital marketplace. At Tumblr, he spearheaded its native advertising offerings as Global Head of Brand Partnership and as Senior Vice President of National Sales at Groupon, Lee built the company’s national sales organization from scratch and pioneered a new marketing category. Brown previously spent over a decade at Yahoo, where he managed the majority of North American media sales at the time of his departure.

He is a native of Kentucky and resides in Bedford, NY with his wife and three children.

Alamjit Sekhon

Pallavi Barman

Pallavi Barman is an informed, well networked, and future-ready brand specialist with over a decade of industry knowledge and understanding.

An engineer in her process orientation and a quasi-tech evangelist coupled with her affinity for planning and detailing acquired through an MBA – Pallavi has stepped up in her career bit by bit, garnering experiences from retail, fashion, consumer goods, and telecommunication to scale up to become a business Head at HRX and the Founder at LAP ventures.

HRX is India’s first homegrown fitness brand which is a forerunner and pioneer in several path-breaking initiatives in the world of fitness. If heading the business and growing it at a positive rate is stimulating for her, being a part of the on-ground communities, content writing and blogging are her passion projects. Being a fitness enthusiast herself, Pallavi doubles up as a KOL for the brand with her commentaries on fitness, nutrition, Women’s health, and holistic fitness. With the attitude and mindset of an everyday athlete, she has created a following for the brand and for herself as a content creator. Pallavi formally trains in calisthenics and practices movement training, weight training, and long-distance running on other days. She is a self-educated nutrition expert with a keen interest in research and experiment who has also counseled people and put them on the path of living a sustainable and holistic lifestyle through course correction, discipline, and course correction.

With her experience at HRX and consulting at other successful celebrity brands like House of Pataudi – the confidence in creating, building, and sustaining successful celebrity propositions was further strengthened and this was the germ that took the shape of LAP Ventures at the peak of pandemic. While most people were consolidating and withdrawing during the pandemic, Pallavi’s contrarian approach make her expand her horizons further and LAP ventures were set up in March of 2021.