SANJAY SHABI is the first-ever South Asian on the Board of Directors of MediaCom, one of the world’s largest media buying agencies.
At MediaCom, Shabi leads its Pan Regional Offline Investment and heads CultureCom, a specialised and unique unit within the main business, focusing on ethnic advertising.
Not many individuals within the mainstream media are pushing the cause for ethnic media and marketing as much as Shabi has reliably been doing for the past 14 years.
“Raising awareness amongst my colleagues and clients about the importance and value of ethnic media and marketing and in turn, inspiring them to do so by showing how adopting this approach can really help grow their businesses,” Shabi told GG2 Power List about the core motive of his initiatives.
Shabi has worked in the industry for over three decades, starting in the multinational Zenith Media in 1990. He joined MediaCom in 2001 and was promoted to board director three years later. The same year the CultureCom division was launched, then the first of its kind.
He is also the longest-standing and serving member of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA)’s Diversity Forum, which is entirely voluntary and proactively seeks to promote the importance of ethnic marketing. One major output from the Forum is The IPA’s New Britain report which is now generally accepted as the industry trade bible that provides a neat, summarised digest primarily for the IPA’s 250 member agencies.
Shabi’s commitment has attracted the IPA to designate him as one of their official spokespersons on IPA Diversity matters, such as in the BBC Radio interviews on the last release of Ethnic Census data and The New Britain report.
His ongoing, industry-leading “Samosa Sessions”, which evangelically extol the virtues of ethnic marketing, led to Shabi being invited by the Press Office at Number 10 and the Home Office to host a Samosa Session for selected government departments.
