Varun Puri

Marketing leader with 9 years building brand, community and acquisition growth across esports, gaming, consumer tech, iGaming and entertainment—leading India, APAC and EMEA marketing from Delhi for companies headquartered in the Netherlands, Singapore and the UK. Delivered campaigns for NVIDIA, Epic Games, Manchester United, NZXT, INNO3D, Apollo Tyres, Parimatch and 1Win, and most recently led marketing for Will Smith's web series. Progressed from community marketing to Chief Marketing Officer to Director of Global Marketing, building marketing functions from the ground up, and leverages formal AI & Machine Learning training (NIT Warangal) to build systems that promote visibility on LLMs and AI engines.

Director of Global Marketing at Fair Sky Partners (2025-07 – 2026-02)

• Rebuilt acquisition and brand campaigns market by market across 4 regulated markets, adapting creative, messaging and channel mix to each regulator's advertising restrictions and local cultural context, driving a 30% increase in regional engagement and sign-ups owning global strategy for a 3-brand iGaming portfolio: SlotStars (Spain, UK), KnightSlots (Canada) and Casino&Friends (Scandinavia)
• Solved a category-wide creative bottleneck: with talent and creator sourcing heavily restricted for regulated gambling brands, produced campaign creative in-house using generative AI (Claude, Midjourney, Runway), keeping 3 brands in continuous content output across 4 markets without external talent
• Ran day-to-day marketing execution on an AI-assisted stack built on Claude, spanning creative production, copy and localisation across 4 languages, enabling a 5-person team to cover 3 brands and 4 markets simultaneously with consistent brand outputt

Marketing Manager at ZOTAC Technology Ltd. (2024-02 – 2025-07)

(6,000+ employee global hardware manufacturer) India & South Asia remit

• Spearheaded the social media strategy that drove a 140% increase in organic engagement across a 90-day campaign period
• Built a short-form video programme in which multiple reels passed 1,000,000+ views, establishing the format as a repeatable channel for product launches
• Forged partnerships with global ecosystem brands, boosting cross-promotional reach by 60%
• Developed new event IP formats, increasing user participation and brand visibility by 35%

Chief Marketing Officer at RISE Media (2023-01 – 2024-02)

Promoted from Marketing Manager

• Ran marketing for a 17-person organisation with the majority of the team reporting to me, alongside a roster of 24 contracted players and a community programme in the hundreds
• Built the region's top-3 men's Valorant roster and its first-ever women's Valorant roster, and scaled Facebook Gaming and Garena programmes to 500,000+ combined followers
• Expanded the brand roster to include NVIDIA and Epic Games, producing 3 Fortnite tournaments end to end (production, casting, admin ops), and Coordinated presence at premier esports tournaments including ESL, Dreamhack and Rise of Legion, reaching a combined audience of 80,000+
• Delivered brand and influencer campaigns for Manchester United, Parimatch, 1Win and Apollo Tyres, increasing brand engagement by 40%
• Delivered always-on campaigns for hardware partners — NZXT's #SaturdayNightGamer and #NZXTSuperheroes (150+ member stories), INNO3D's Discord launch and SilverStone × Funko collaborations

Marketing Manager at RISE Media (2020-04 – 2022-12)

Brand & Community Marketing Lead at NVIDIA GamerConnect (2017-10 – 2020-03)

• Headed Community Marketing for GamerConnect, the NVIDIA-owned community programme, organising online and offline events with major gaming and hardware brands and reaching 20,000+ attendees
• Served as Gaming Ambassador for Dell Alienware and Lenovo Legion, driving 700+ customer interactions per in-store activation, the highest across the programme
• Ran multi-brand activations across 5+ brand partnerships, spanning retail, community engagement and cross-brand promotion

Master of Business Administration in Marketing – Amity University (2024-08 – 2026-03)

Post Graduate Diploma in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning – E&ICT Academy, National Institute of Technology (NIT) Warangal (2023-08 – 2024-08)

Bachelor's Degree in Business, Management & Marketing – University of Delhi (2017)