Vice President, Advertising Commercial Finance — Advertiser Success Investment

The mandate

Advertiser-support investment is expanding through onboarding assistance, specialist account coverage and commercial incentives. Those resources can strengthen durable customer activity, but reported spending growth does not reliably show which interventions created value and which merely paid for temporary participation. The VP will own finance across the advertiser-success investment portfolio, connecting customer behaviour and commercial evidence to the budget choices made by advertising leadership rather than assuming every retained account justifies the same level of support.

Open-ended permanent employment supports a first eighteen-month programme to establish advertiser investment economics and embed them in ongoing commercial reviews. Twenty-four specialists form the finance perimeter. Bengaluru is the base, with planned work across global support interfaces. Advertising operations retain customer service execution and sales leadership retains relationships. The finance chief for this function owns the financial recommendation and standards, not the advertiser's own business performance or the technical measurement of every campaign outcome.

Within approved delegation, the VP sets investment evaluation rules, reallocates funded support budgets and approves commercial finance exceptions. Material incentive architecture changes and budget increases require executive approval with appropriate legal and policy review. Technical attribution owners determine measurement methods. Finance must distinguish a plausible relationship from demonstrated incrementality and make weak evidence visible, especially where highly serviced accounts were already likely to increase spending without the intervention being assessed.

The lasting role includes forecasting, planning and financial challenge over advertiser-success resources. It excludes ad-auction design, client marketing advice and statutory accounting ownership. Directors expect decisions that explain the difference between sustained net revenue, accelerated spending and activity supported by incentives or credits. The finance team should be able to recommend targeted support, a smaller test or withdrawal of an ineffective programme without hiding behind aggregate growth whose apparent success may be dominated by customer selection rather than the investment itself.

What you will own

• Establish an advertiser investment view linking support intensity, incentives and verified net revenue, preserving customer differences so the team does not attribute growth automatically to programmes aimed at accounts already predisposed to expand.
• Decide funded support priorities within the approved envelope, comparing additional specialist coverage, onboarding investment and retention interventions against evidence of likely commercial benefit and the cost of maintaining each commitment.
• Govern evaluation of commercial incentives and credits with accounting and policy owners, making the difference between gross customer activity, recognised income and durable economic contribution clear before executives judge a programme successful.
• Challenge advertiser-success forecasts through retention, expansion and support-demand scenarios, distinguishing committed resources from assumptions that depend on uncertain customer response or capacity not yet approved in the operating plan.
• Require proportionate investment tests where incremental effect is unclear, working with measurement specialists to define usable finance evidence without claiming causal precision that the available customer data cannot support.
• Present commercial review choices with explicit stop, refine and scale conditions, explaining why an apparently successful intervention may merit a smaller commitment when its cost or customer selection weakens the economic case.
• Develop finance managers who can discuss uncertain intervention value constructively with sales and service leaders, maintain controlled assumptions and preserve an independent recommendation under pressure to endorse headline advertiser growth.

Candidate qualifications

• Establish substantial senior finance leadership in advertising, retail, consumer or technology businesses, with personal responsibility for a meaningful planning and commercial decision perimeter. Show an investment in customer growth or support that you changed using verified economics. Function-head responsibility and decision contribution must be demonstrated directly; a title or an attractive revenue result without evidence of your financial judgement will not establish readiness.
• Demonstrate rigorous FP&A, business-finance and management-accounting competence, supported by relevant professional education or equivalent senior responsibility. Explain how incentives, credits or support costs affected the interpretation of growth. You must reconcile management measures to reliable financial records and recognise when a commercial metric cannot responsibly be treated as recognised revenue or cash available to fund further investment.
• Have worked with sales, service and measurement owners when customer response was uncertain. Describe how you distinguished an observed association from a sufficiently supported investment conclusion, and what smaller test or conditional choice you recommended. You are not expected to be an advertising scientist, but you must understand the limits of specialist evidence and avoid turning an unverified incrementality claim into a confident finance recommendation.
• Have led finance specialists and owned executive communication through competing commercial priorities. Evidence should include a budget choice whose benefits were disputed and an intervention you stopped or redesigned. The role requires practical engagement with advertiser-support operations, disciplined confidentiality and clear authority boundaries. Strong leadership combines constructive challenge with accountable decisions, rather than treating either commercial enthusiasm or an unexplained central model as decisive proof.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 13 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-238.