TRUECALLER STRENGTHENS COMMERCIAL PUSH WITH APPOINTMENT OF VIKAS KHANNA AS SENIOR DIRECTOR, AD SALES

Truecaller has named veteran media executive Vikas Khanna as Senior Director, Ad Sales, signalling a stronger focus on advertiser relationships and monetisation. With over 25 years across print, television and digital, Khanna is expected to drive growth, expand partnerships and build Truecaller’s positioning in India’s fast-growing digital advertising ecosystem.

Truecaller has announced the appointment of Vikas Khanna as Senior Director, Ad Sales, marking a significant strengthening of the company’s commercial leadership at a time when digital advertising, identity verification, and mobile communication platforms are rapidly converging. The appointment signals Truecaller’s intention to expand deeper into advertiser relationships, enhance monetisation opportunities and build on its already considerable scale in India, one of its most important growth markets.

For Truecaller, a platform long associated with caller identification and spam protection, the evolution of its business into a broader advertising and engagement ecosystem has been underway for several years. As mobile usage in India continues to outpace many global markets, advertisers are increasingly looking for environments that offer both reach and relevance, and Truecaller has positioned itself as a player with unique advantages — from user intent signals to behavioural usage patterns. Bringing in a seasoned media leader like Khanna appears to be a move designed to consolidate those strengths and unlock new categories of revenue.

Khanna’s career spans more than 25 years across print, television and digital media — a trajectory that mirrors the transformation of India’s media industry itself. Beginning at a time when print publications dominated the advertising landscape, Khanna saw firsthand the impact of television’s rise, followed by the next wave of disruption driven by internet adoption and mobile-first consumption. Those who have worked alongside him describe his leadership style as commercially aggressive, partnership-driven and grounded in an understanding of how brands evaluate value in a fragmented media environment. Over the years, he has worked closely with both traditional and emerging advertisers, helped scale sales operations and built partnerships that cut across sectors such as consumer goods, technology, automotive, entertainment and financial services.

The timing of the appointment is significant. India’s digital advertising market has expanded substantially over the last decade, now forming one of the largest globally. Even as macroeconomic shifts have caused periods of caution among brand marketers, digital remains the stronghold of measurable targeting, attribution and campaign optimisation. With near-universal smartphone penetration across urban centres and continued growth in smaller towns, platforms that operate at scale are increasingly expected to provide not just inventory but deep audience understanding. Truecaller has long held a privileged place on user phones, with its utility-driven install base enabling advertisers to reach audiences in moments that are adjacent to core communication behaviours. For advertisers, those moments are not just about impressions but about attention, context and performance — parameters Khanna is expected to emphasise in his new mandate.

Industry observers note that the advertising opportunity for platforms like Truecaller sits at an interesting intersection. While social networks, OTT platforms and search continue to capture the bulk of digital spending, there is growing interest in high-frequency touchpoints that are not purely entertainment-driven. Communication screens, caller identification surfaces and notification-layer interactions are increasingly being seen as monetisable avenues, especially because they tend to generate high recall and are less susceptible to passive scrolling habits. As brands look for fresh pathways beyond the saturated feeds of social platforms, Truecaller’s surfaces — caller screens, intent signalling and contextual prompts — are attracting attention for their novelty and performance attributes.

Khanna’s track record in building high-impact advertising partnerships suggests that relationship-building and category education will be central to Truecaller’s next phase in India. Building advertiser confidence is as much about measurement as it is about storytelling. Platforms that sit outside the big social and search ecosystems often need to demonstrate their value through data, case studies and evidence around incremental ROI. Khanna’s experience working across different media formats positions him well to articulate Truecaller’s proposition to marketers in language that aligns with campaign objectives, whether those objectives are branding, performance, engagement or acquisition.

Beyond sales strategy, part of Khanna’s remit will likely involve collaboration with product and marketing teams to develop newer ad formats that feel native rather than intrusive. As consumers grow increasingly protective of digital attention, platforms have been forced to innovate in how advertising is presented. Non-disruptive formats that integrate into core utility experiences have shown greater acceptance, particularly on mobile applications that users depend on multiple times a day. By leaning on design, contextual cues and intelligent targeting, Truecaller may find opportunities to expand its ad portfolio without compromising user experience — a delicate balance that media leaders are now required to master.

Truecaller’s broader evolution also forms the context for Khanna’s appointment. The company has been making strategic moves to deepen its presence in markets such as India through partnerships, new features and vertical expansions. From spam detection and fraud prevention to messaging and enterprise verification tools, Truecaller is expanding from a caller ID app into a broader communication infrastructure play. With fraud prevention emerging as both a consumer concern and a business opportunity, enterprises are increasingly looking for reliable channels to authenticate, verify and engage customers. These enterprise tools, while not directly tied to advertising, create an ecosystem in which advertiser confidence grows — especially as transparency and safety become critical considerations.

The Indian advertising ecosystem, meanwhile, continues to reward platforms with scale and measurable engagement. In this context, Khanna’s arrival may help Truecaller build bridges with agency networks as well as direct brand clients. Agencies remain critical intermediaries in digital spending, influencing how budgets get allocated across awareness and performance buckets. Building visibility within planning teams, winning share-of-wallet within large brand retainers and positioning the platform as not just relevant but strategically useful are likely to form the pillars of Truecaller’s commercial ambitions under Khanna’s leadership.

Colleagues who have worked with Khanna describe him as someone who enjoys building teams and fostering operational discipline. Sales organisations are often high-pressure environments, shaped by targets, pacing cycles and constant coordination with cross-functional departments. Leaders who succeed in such roles are typically those who can blend market sensibilities with internal alignment, balancing long-term partnerships with short-term revenue imperatives. Khanna’s multi-media background gives him familiarity with navigating these tensions, particularly as advertisers continue to recalibrate budgets toward digital.

While Truecaller did not disclose specific strategic initiatives tied to the appointment, the messaging around Khanna’s credentials — particularly his expertise in driving growth and forging advertising partnerships — suggests that revenue acceleration and advertiser diversification are priorities for the company as it enters its next phase. For a platform that commands significant user trust and daily engagement in India, the ability to translate that usage into sustainable revenue streams will be essential, especially in an environment where competition for ad dollars intensifies with every new media format.

Khanna’s appointment, therefore, can be read as both a tactical and symbolic move: tactical in terms of sales leadership and symbolic in signalling that Truecaller intends to compete more aggressively within the digital advertising economy. As the interplay between communication platforms and commerce deepens, and as advertisers seek new routes to cut through noise, media leaders with cross-domain fluency become central to how platforms capture opportunity. Truecaller appears to have placed a strategic bet in that direction.