Strategy & Commercial Growth Leadership

Architect of unfair advantage.

Strategy and commercial growth leader with 21+ years across agency, client and AdTech, including senior mandates at WPP/MediaCom, DoubleVerify and Travelocity. Known for taking ambiguous, high-stakes briefs across pitches, market entries and transformation mandates, converting them into structured commercial outcomes, then building the systems and teams that sustain them.

Available for short-term and long-term engagements in strategy development, knowledge work and pitch support; remote or in-market.

hello@siddharthasingh.com
www.sidht.com

21+Years in strategy, marketing and growth

17 / 23Pitches personally led and won

$700MMulti-AOR DME ecosystem led

$170MGlobal SK-II AOR business

Core territories

The problems I am built to lead.

My range spans strategy, planning, growth, brand, behaviour, media effectiveness and AI. The common thread is leadership through ambiguity: defining the problem, building the strategic argument, aligning the system around it and translating the answer into something that can operate.

Business & Growth Strategy

Integrated Planning

Pitch Leadership

Brand & Communications Strategy

Culture & Behavioural Insight

Media Effectiveness

AI & Post-Algorithm Strategy

Global-Local Operating Models

Reach

APAC · EMEA · Global

Category experience

FMCG · Beauty · Tech · Ecommerce · Travel · Financial Services · AdTech

Leadership experience

Strategy with operating scar tissue.

Jan 2025 – Present

Antigen StrategyFounder & Independent Strategy Advisor

Strategy practice focused on growth systems, organisational distinctiveness, AI-enabled planning and the consequences of algorithmic optimisation.

Advise founders and leadership teams on ambiguous growth, positioning, marketing and operating-model questions; convert diagnosis into strategic choices and action.
Build original IP and human-AI planning tools spanning system interrogation, brief reframing, scenario exploration and capability building.
Authoring ANTIGENERIC and a wider body of work on how organisations recover strategic variety and distinction.

Sep 2021 – Jan 2025

DoubleVerifyGlobal Client & Agency Lead, APAC

Senior stewardship of major holding-company and multinational client partnerships across APAC.

Structured joint business plans and multi-market programmes around media quality, attention, measurement, carbon and AI-enabled optimisation.
Convened client, agency, platform and measurement stakeholders around test-and-learn agendas; translated new technology into planning decisions.
Trained 500+ GroupM practitioners and led executive workshops across the region.

Jun 2010 – Aug 2021

MediaCom / WPPGlobal & Regional Strategy / Client Leadership

Progressed through APAC Digital Lead; APAC Coca-Cola Lead; Global Strategy Director and EMEA Coca-Cola Lead; Global Media Lead for SK-II/P&G; and APAC Digital Transformation & Consulting Lead.

Led strategy and account leadership across global, regional and country AORs; managed senior clients, central hubs and market teams across Asia, Europe and North America.
Built growth, brand, media, content, commerce and data strategies; codified them into global principles, investment frameworks, toolkits and operating rhythms.
Won 17 of 23 pitches personally led across FMCG, technology and ecommerce.
Central Strategy Lead for global campaigns and toolkits including UEFA Euro Cup, Nestea Global Restage, Coke MasterBrand / Schweppes relaunch, Coke Stream and Coke Studio.

2007 – 2010

Travelocity IndiaHead of Marketing

Delivered 950% year-on-year transaction growth while reducing acquisition cost by 67%; integrated ATL, digital, ecommerce and analytics around one growth model.

2004 – 2006

Interactive AvenuesStrategy Manager

Led strategy and planning for the agency's leading clients and prospects; built early expertise across digital acquisition, ecommerce and measurable consumer response.

Strategic conversion

Ambiguous brief. Structured argument. Commercial outcome.

Selected strategy & pitch impact

Evidence, not adjectives.

The work spans pitches, growth architecture, global planning, operating models, AI, data and capability. What matters is the conversion from strategic argument into decisions, systems and measurable outcomes.

Pitch Leadership & Strategic Conversion

Led complex global, regional and market pitches across FMCG, technology and ecommerce, with 17 wins from 23 pitches personally led. Owned the strategic argument from opportunity framing and RFI/RFP response through war-room leadership, senior presentation and mobilisation. Experienced on both sides of agency selection, contracting, onboarding and governance.

Growth Architecture & Global Planning

Co-authored Coca-Cola's Global Media & Digital Principles, synthesising 140+ case studies and marketing-mix models into a global decision framework. Created planning architecture covering systemic diagnosis and sources of growth through behavioural triggers, connection roles, implementation and optimisation.

Coca-Cola / Global Strategy

Led EMEA strategy and account leadership across 15+ markets and a multi-AOR ecosystem of approximately $700M in DME; partnered with 150+ client and agency FTE and improved agency evaluation from 2.2 to 3.6 out of 4. Directed campaign systems spanning Coke Masterbrand, Schweppes, UEFA Euro, Nestea and Coke Studio.

P&G and SK-II / Performance & Operating Models

Built and led SK-II's central-global AOR setup for a $170M business through a 20-person hub and approximately 80 FTE across Japan, China and the US. Built a performance framework contributing to double-digit new-user growth and a 27% lift in brand search. Developed P&G's APAC video-neutral allocation framework, informing approximately $120M in investment.

AI, Data, Behaviour & Futures

Led AI-driven content planning and purchase-journey optimisation pilots; used agent-based modelling to explore post-COVID luxury scenarios. Designed data-driven contextual content interventions delivering 9% sales growth in impulse-purchase occasions. Developed programmes around attention, programmatic architecture, media quality and algorithmic optimisation.

Capability Building

Created Coca-Cola's six-day Recognised Media Expert programme and led planning, digital transformation and effectiveness training across APAC. Built frameworks, tools and learning systems designed to make strategic capability transferable rather than consultant dependent.

950%Travelocity India YoY transaction growth

−67%Cost-per-acquisition reduction at Travelocity

27%Global brand-search lift for SK-II

500+GroupM practitioners trained

2.2→3.6Agency evaluation score improvement

Most useful when

The issue is not more activity. It is the system producing the outcome.

Growth has stalled despite competent execution; aggressive optimisation is producing strategic sameness; a brief is asking unfamiliar or uncomfortable questions; or business, culture, behaviours, data and technology are being treated as separate problems but are actually one system.

Current work / explorations / interests

What I am building and investigating now.

My current work extends the operating career rather than sitting beside it. The common question is increasingly precise: when intelligence, synthesis and optimisation become abundant, where does durable strategic advantage move?

That inquiry moves between commercial strategy, AI, institutional design, culture and human behaviour. Some of it becomes advisory work through Antigen; some becomes books, essays, diagnostic tools, maps and experimental strategic systems.

AI & post-algorithm strategy Growth systems Behaviour & choice Distinctiveness & sameness Institutional forensics Futures & trend theory Strategic anthropology Human systems

Antigen / Strategy practice

From diagnosis to operating system

Building advisory methods and human-AI planning tools around system interrogation, brief reframing, strategic variety, scenario exploration and organisational distinctiveness.

Open current strategy system ↗

Book / Organisational distinctiveness

ANTIGENERIC

A book-length argument that optimisation systems, inherited conventions and institutional incentives can manufacture competent but increasingly average outcomes.

Explore the manuscripts ↗

Book / Human systems

When Lions Get the Blues

An investigation into high-agency performance, internal collapse and the psychic cost of continuing to produce output inside highly optimised human systems.

Read related essay ↗

Live exploration threads

These are not separate hobbies. They are recurring research threads that feed back into how I frame commercial and organisational problems.

01 / Systems under pressure

AI as environment, not simply tool

What changes when algorithms cease to be specialist technology and become the infrastructure through which markets, culture, choice and judgment are mediated?

02 / Sameness

Why optimisation converges

From recommendation systems to brand planning, I am interested in the paradox of systems that work extremely well while progressively narrowing the range of acceptable outcomes.

03 / Institutions

Read the system through its own evidence

Annual reports, investor narratives, organisational language and operating models often reveal what an institution is actually optimising for more clearly than its stated strategy.

04 / Culture & change

Places, trends and illegible context

Cities, informal networks and cultural movements become laboratories for studying status, identity, authorship and the forms of context that formal datasets routinely miss.

Selected writing & builds

Representative pieces from the public writing and Antigen sandbox that show how the research is being converted into strategic argument, diagnosis and machinery.

Essay / Systems

The Post-Algorithm World

Algorithms as the environment in which strategy, choice and culture increasingly operate.

Read essay

Essay / Institutional forensics

The Agency — A Forensics Essay

What agency value becomes when production, synthesis and operating intelligence grow abundant.

Read essay

Essay / Culture

Why Do All Songs Sound the Same?

Recommendation, optimisation and the paradox of systems that work well enough to narrow discovery.

Read essay

Diagnostic tool

Antigen Bland-Buster

Ninety-five linguistic and organisational “pathogens” used to diagnose strategic sameness, algorithmic flattening and process fetishism.

Open tool

System map / AI

AI Vendor Dashboard

383 vendors mapped across 17 fields; exhaustive ecosystem mapping used as the precursor to strategic interpretation.

Open dashboard

System map / Industry

Media & Agency System Map

An interactive ecosystem map for reading structural pressure and the shifting location of strategic value.

Open map

Browse all long-form writing ↗

Education & credentials

Built across disciplines.

Education

PG Degree, Communications Management
MICA, 2002–2004

BSc, Biochemistry
Christ College, Bangalore University, 1998–2001

Credentials

IIM Bangalore
Leading Strategic Change

Advisory Board Center
Board Chair Certification, 2023

Google
Analytics, DV360, Campaign Manager, Display, Search and Creative Suite

Strengths

Systems thinking
Pattern recognition
Diagnostic framing
Framework design
Commercial judgement
Cross-functional leadership
Storytelling

Gallup: Strategy; Input; Learning; Activating; Responsibility

Working principle

Strategy is a verb. The change in the real world is the work.

Conversation

Start with the question.

The best conversations begin before the answer has hardened. I am available for short-term and long-term engagements in strategy development, knowledge work and pitch support; remote or in-market.

hello@siddharthasingh.com www.sidht.com