Baba Shetty

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Baba Shetty leads the commercial strategy group for Syneos Health, responsible for teams and solutions supporting insight, innovation, market research, trends, behavioral science, and data science – all in service of client success.

Prior to Syneos Health, Baba was Chief Strategy and Media Officer at DigitasLBi, overseeing all media groups including programmatic, mobile, social, search, and media technology. In 2015 DigitasLBi won four Adweek Media Plan of the Year awards — the most wins ever by a single agency in a single year. Baba was previously CEO of Newsweek / Daily Beast, which won the 2013 Webby award for best news site. Fast Company dubbed the all-digital re-launch of Newsweek.com, which he led, “a new model for online magazines”. From 2005 to 2012 Baba worked at Hill Holliday, serving first as Chief Media Officer and then adding the role of Chief Strategy Officer. While there, Baba led strategy for two client programs that each won a Cannes Lion.

Prior to Hill Holliday, Baba spent three years as a research director and principal analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, MA. While at Forrester, Baba advised clients on a wide variety of digital topics, including interaction design best practices and digital marketing. Baba also worked seven years at BMW, leading marketing communications for the U.S. market. He was part of the team that initiated the BMW Films project, which inspired and won the first Cannes Titanium Lion, became a Harvard Business School case study, was inducted into the permanent collection of MOMA, and was named one of the 10 Best Digital Ideas of the Decade by the One Show.

Baba is an avid student of brand, media and digital excellence : he was one of seven Grand Effie judges in 2014; a Cannes Lion Media juror in 2015; and the Jury Chair for the 2015 Adweek Media Plan on the Year awards. Baba previously served on the advisory board of Maven Networks, an online video company acquired by Yahoo! for $160 million.