AMAZON ADS INDIA NAMES AKILA JAYARAMAN HEAD OF AGENCY PARTNERSHIPS TO DRIVE FULL-FUNNEL GROWTH

Amazon Ads India has appointed Akila Jayaraman as Head of Agency Partnerships. In her new role, she will strengthen collaboration with agencies across media, e-commerce, Amazon DSP and full-funnel solutions, linking brand-building with performance outcomes and leveraging customer insights to help brands drive measurable impact across the advertising funnel.

Amazon Ads India has appointed Akila Jayaraman as Head of Agency Partnerships, bringing in a seasoned leader to deepen collaboration with media and creative partners and strengthen the company’s full-funnel advertising value proposition in one of its fastest-growing markets. The appointment signals Amazon’s continued investment in building a more integrated advertising ecosystem in India, where the boundaries between awareness, consideration, and conversion are becoming increasingly fluid. For agencies and brands navigating that complexity, the ability to connect brand-building with measurable outcomes has become a strategic imperative.

In her new role, Jayaraman will oversee partnerships across media, e-commerce, Amazon DSP, and full-funnel advertising solutions. She will interface closely with agency networks, independent shop partners, and brand marketers to align campaign strategies with business objectives, and to demonstrate how customer-first insights can fuel effectiveness at scale. The move also underscores Amazon’s ambition to leverage its cross-category customer intelligence as a differentiator. With millions of daily shopping interactions generating real-time signals on intent, discovery, and purchase patterns, Amazon Ads positions itself as a platform capable not just of facilitating transactions but of influencing the consumer journey end-to-end.

Jayaraman’s remit at Amazon comes at a time when advertisers are increasingly seeking platforms that can meaningfully bridge upper-funnel visibility with measurable lower-funnel outputs. Traditional campaign planning—historically marked by a clean division between brand and performance—has seen that separation collapse. Agencies today face pressure to deliver both creative storytelling and business impact, often within the same campaign architecture. By expanding its agency-facing leadership, Amazon Ads is betting that deeper coordination with agency ecosystems can accelerate that shift.

Over the course of her career, Jayaraman has held several leadership roles spanning digital strategy, platform partnerships, commerce-focused marketing, and media investment. Her experience working with cross-functional brand teams, combined with her exposure to measurement and performance optimisation, is expected to play a pivotal role in shaping Amazon Ads’ partnership agenda. Industry executives note that her appointment reflects the growing seniority and specialisation required in commerce media—a space that sits at the intersection of traditional advertising and retail data infrastructure.

The rise of commerce-led advertising represents one of the most significant shifts in marketing over the last decade. As e-commerce adoption scaled across categories ranging from electronics and apparel to essentials and beauty, brands found themselves engaging with consumers at points much closer to purchase than traditional mass media touchpoints allowed. This compressed path-to-purchase created new opportunities for brands to influence conversions while capturing first-party data: a dynamic that retail media platforms were uniquely positioned to harness. Amazon Ads, among the earliest movers in formalising retail media capabilities, has been steadily expanding its suite of demand-side tools, audience targeting capabilities, creative formats, and measurement offerings in India.

Under Jayaraman’s leadership, the company is expected to accelerate education and collaboration with agency partners to bring these capabilities into mainstream campaign planning. A major area of focus will involve helping agencies not only activate media solutions but translate campaign outputs into brand equity and revenue signals that clients can track. That layer of measurability has become increasingly important in boardroom conversations as marketing leaders justify investments amid macroeconomic volatility and tighter performance accountability.

For Amazon, the strengthening of its agency partnerships also fits into a broader strategic context: as streaming, online video and digital retail environments converge, so too do the budgets that previously sat within siloed buying teams. Agencies play an integral role in reorganizing those budgets around consumer journeys rather than channels, a shift that favours platforms capable of offering reach, relevance, and return in connected ways.

Jayaraman joins Amazon Ads India at an inflexion point for the industry. With India’s digital advertising market expanding, brands escalating direct-to-consumer ambitions, and agencies retooling their capabilities for a hybrid future, the role of platforms as both partners and enablers has never been more consequential. Her appointment is expected to help shape how Amazon collaborates with the country’s evolving agency landscape and how agencies, in turn, help brands unlock the full value of commerce-driven advertising in the years ahead.