MPW 2023: How Anupriya Acharya went from teaching chemistry to becoming one of the biggest names in advertising

If things had been left to fate, Anupriya Acharya would have been teaching chemistry today. In fact, she did exactly that right after her Master’s in Chemistry from IIT Roorkee.

Growing up in Dehradun and a science degree meant a job at ONGC or teaching. She chose the latter and was at it for a few years after marriage took her to Chennai. “It was clear to me that growth would be difficult,” she says. One thing led to another and she landed a job in Ogilvy & Mather’s media department.

She moved to Delhi and then Mumbai with stints at Mindshare Fulcrum and Group M before joining Publicis’s ZenithOptimedia in 2013. Three years later, she took charge as Publicis Media’s CEO. “I was lucky to see many stages starting with the emergence of cable and satellite television to a very different world today,” she says.

Her responsibility has since been magnified as CEO of Publicis Groupe, South Asia. That means overseeing pretty much everything. “It keeps me at the cutting edge since there are so many cultural changes,” she says. The only downside is that there’s less time to indulge the fitness freak in her.

@krishnagopalan