WPP Media hires Prachi Narayan to lead partnerships on Google account

WPP Media has appointed Prachi Narayan as Head of Partnerships at Media Futures Group, the bespoke global media and advertising agency the holding group created exclusively for Google. She joins from Havas Media Network India, where she served as Managing Partner – Havas Play from July 2025 to August 2026.

The announcement, published October 24, frames the hire around a single headline number: Narayan brings more than 20 years of experience across newsrooms, broadcast, branded content and entertainment. What the release does not say is equally telling. WPP Media has not disclosed the scope of the partnerships role, the size of the team she will run, or how the Media Futures Group structure divides responsibilities with the wider WPP machine.

Who is Prachi Narayan?

Her most recent posting was brief. The Havas Play role lasted roughly thirteen months, from July 2025 to August 2026, according to the announcement. Before that, she spent longer stretches in production-side and branded content leadership.

Her CV, as listed in the announcement, runs:

• Managing Partner – Havas Play, Havas Media Network India (July 2025 – August 2026)
• Associate Vice President, Creative Services, Prime Focus Technologies (August 2020 – March 2022), where she headed the company's largest OAP programme for Disney Southeast Asia and handled strategic operations for the group
• Deputy Executive Producer and Team Lead, Republic Media Network, leading branded content initiatives and end-to-end solutions spanning content conceptualisation, intellectual property development, production, team management and client servicing
• Senior Producer, Special Programming, TV Today, earlier in her career

What does this change for the Google account?

In practice, probably not much immediately. A Head of Partnerships hire at a bespoke agency unit signals relationship management, not a strategy overhaul. Narayan's background sits almost entirely in content and production — newsrooms, broadcast, branded entertainment — rather than media planning or buying. That profile suggests Media Futures Group wants someone who can build content-led partnerships around Google, though neither WPP Media nor Google has said so on the record.

No quote from Narayan appears in the announcement. No WPP Media executive is quoted either. For a hire presented as significant enough to announce, the absence of any stated rationale is a gap practitioners will notice. There is no word on who she reports to, whether the role is India-based or global, or whether the appointment fills a vacancy or creates a new post.

The wider context

Media Futures Group exists because WPP built it for one client: Google. A dedicated agency unit serving a single platform owner is an unusual arrangement, and partnership leadership inside it carries a specific tension — the agency's client is also one of the largest media sellers on earth. How Narayan navigates that structure will be the real test of the appointment, and nothing in the announcement addresses it.

For now, the move is a personnel fact: one experienced branded-content operator, one bespoke agency, one very large client watching.