At 35, Abhishek Desai is the youngest leader in P&G India’s leadership team. For his work across different marketing roles in P&G, Desai has won many accolades and top awards at forums like Cannes and the Effies, to name a few. In his over decade long career at P&G, he has worked on iconic brands like Gillette, Oral-B, Tide, Head & Shoulders, Downy, Pampers, Duracell across different geographies including India, Korea, ASEAN, Australia and China.
As part of the India leadership team, Desai played a key role in double-digit topline and bottom-line growth for P&G India in FY17-18 by enabling strong marketing plans across categories, making India one of the fastest growing markets for P&G globally. He revamped the direct-to-consumer programme for P&G marrying in-depth consumer understanding with new-to-theworld technology to sharply and effectively target consumers directly without traditional intermediaries. This programme is a key part of P&G India’s growth plan and delivered over 30% of P&G India’s growth.
Over the years, P&G India has come to be associated with multiple award-winning campaigns and Desai says that the challenge in being a marketer is balancing long term equity with short term growth. “Creativity is the cessation of mediocrity,” he adds. A passionate advocate for positive change in the country, Desai has been instrumental in step-changing the P&G CSR programme, P&G Shiksha, which has helped support over 1,500 schools and will impact more than a million children. Desai led the launch of the new P&G Shiksha film which crossed 70 million views in just 15 days, making it the highest digitally viewed video for P&G India. So, no surprises that this is a campaign that he takes pride in. Desai says, “For P&G Shiksha, we used our brands’ voices as a force for good, while driving incredible connect with consumers. The video was seen more than 100 million times.”
He has played a key role in developing external alliances to drive growth. For example, alliances with government authorities to educate young girls on menstrual hygiene, college capability programmes to groom young talent and preparing them for employment, hospital partnerships for trial of Pampers diapers, etc.
Desai has also been leading internal and industry effort on brand safety and media accountability. Within P&G, he ensured 100% of digital spends on brand-safe content and created a culture of spending linked to measurements. Externally, Desai is leading a project for Indian Society of Advertisers to drive industry-relevant opportunities and challenges like digital measurements, knowledge-sharing, etc. Desai also serves as Director on the Board of ISA.
“While working on Gillette, we realized that most consumers considered shaving a chore that they could avoid. We brought shaving out from the bathroom to mainstream conversations via The Shave India Movement. We sparked debates by bringing in perspective from women, employers and key influencers, driving preference for shaving and significantly growing the brand in India.”
Chetna Soni, one of the youngest business leaders in the FMCG industry in India, heads P&G India’s second largest brand, Whisper. She joined P&G (Marketing) in 2008 and has led P&G’s Feminine Care and Hair Care businesses in South-East Asia, Middle- East & Africa and Europe. Soni has been instrumental in accelerating the growth of the businesses she has led, growing market-share in the face of fierce competition and macro-economic challenges. During her last six years in Feminine Care, she has shaped the strategy to drive social change through campaigns focused on women’s issues, especially taboos surrounding menstruation. Soni’s initiatives on Whisper also ensure that over four million girls are provided access to menstrual hygiene products every year, through Whisper’s Health & Hygiene Programme that impacts nearly 40,000 schools across India. To her credit are campaigns such as #TouchThePickle that spoke against period taboos and won a Grand Prix at Cannes 2015 (Glass).
In September 2017, Soni brought on #SitImproper to drive awareness and trial for the new Whisper Ultra Soft, through a campaign that challenged society’s definition of lady-like conduct and the proper way for women to sit. In January 2018, when conversations around menstruation were at an unprecedented high, Soni decided to leverage it to increase Whisper’s share of voice through #WhispersBreakSilence. The campaign talked about girls’ first period stories, reminding them how Whisper had set them free and that they could help someone else break the silence around periods too.
After interacting with consumers across geographies, age groups and socioeconomic strata, I realized that consumers will always reward brands that demonstrate an intimate understanding of their lives and weave those insights into their products and the way they speak to them. Understanding one’s consumers better than anyone else is the hallmark of great brands and campaigns.”
Shashank Surana, VP, New Product Development, DS Group, has played a significant role in one of the most recent successful brand launches from the company - Pass Pass Pulse candy, a raw mango hard-boiled candy with a tangy salt-filled center. Within a year of launch, the brand crossed the Rs 150 crore mark and changed the dynamics of the segment, which registered a growth of 23%, a high in many years. Launched in 2015, Pass Pass Pulse candy was initially tactically promoted and established through various BTL activities and strategically promoted on the digital platform. Last year, Pulse became the No. 1 candy of India, crossing the Rs 300 crore mark.
Surana’s role comprises market and brand research for new products; overseeing branding, marketing, packaging, and envisioning product cycle and positioning. He has successfully added to the growth and expansion of DS Group and contributed to the Group’s foray in the confectionery segment with mini gums Chingles in various flavours.
Surana has also worked at EY and while involved in industry and company specific research and building valuation models at EY, the process of product development caught his fancy. He says, “In a moment of sudden inspiration, there was a strong revelation of wanting to be involved with a product/brand right from the ideation to the time the consumer buys it and of course fathom the response to it. That was the light bulb moment for me and the DS Group gave me the right opportunity.”
Right from ideation of Pulse candy to pricing, packaging, placement and the promotion, it was an exciting expedition for the team. Pulse candy redefined the hard-boiled candy segment, which had seen little innovation. Defying the pricing barrier of 50 paise, Pulse was launched at Re 1 and soon become the No. 1 in its segment. A category disruptor, it is one of the most successful examples of brands that were initially built through word-of-mouth with social media facilitating the reach.”
In his 15 years of end-to-end brand-building experience at blue-chip FMCGs like PepsiCo, P&G and Gillette, Dilen Gandhi has built several hundred million dollar businesses and achieved record market shares. Apart from India, he has market experience spanning ASEAN, Middle East & Africa and worked across varied categories from Salty Snacks to Sanitary Napkins & Diapers to Fabric Care to Men’s Grooming.
Among his key achievements, Gandhi led Lay’s India to a spectacular turnaround since 2016, from a de-growth of 4% in 2015 to over 20% growth in the past 18 months, making Lay’s not only the fastest growing, most profitable brand in PepsiCo India but also making India the fastest growing market for Lay’s worldwide. What helped boost numbers was the recent Lay’s Real Flavours Of Life campaign. “It’s the first time we’ve articulated this iconic brand’s point of view and the in-markets results have been truly fantastic,” says Gandhi. He also successfully launched Doritos in India and achieved market leadership within eight months of launch. He also built Pampers India from $25 million to $100 million in sales in the time-period 2008-2011.
What excites Gandhi as a marketer is the “privilege of meeting hundreds of people during consumer research at their homes”, whom he would not have ordinarily met or spoken to. “It has taught me that the work we do in marketing makes a real, even if small difference to actual people’s lives. From the mother who cried when explaining how Tide makes washing clothes so fast that she can spend more time with her sick child, to the schoolgirl who wasn’t afraid to discuss periods because of Whisper, to the teenager whose life wouldn’t be complete without a packet of Lay’s shared with friends - the stories I’ve heard from real people have inspired me and continue to inspire me daily,” he says. Before donning the marketer’s hat, Gandhi worked at the NGO, Child Rights & You.
“The idea that ‘consumers’ are people first. And as people they tend not to be immersed in your brand as much as you imagine they would. Therefore it’s important to think as a normal person and try and communicate in a simple way.”
Gaurav Mehta is the Chief Marketing Officer of GirnarSoft, parent company of category-leading consumer internet brands like CarDekho, Gaadi, Zigwheels, BikeDekho, Oto.com (Indonesia) amongst others. Since he took over as CMO, he reorganized the digital marketing and editorial practices at GirnarSoft, brought down the marketing costs by 35% and saw video dominance in the auto vertical space. In addition, he carried out the brand architecting and restructuring exercise at GirnarSoft for different group companies.
Both CarDekho and ZigWheels YouTube channels grew by 61% and 130% (YOY) respectively. The auto vertical space recorded growth of 50% (YOY) in FY 2018 to 420 million visitors. Mehta also helped launch new businesses in Auto Finance and Insurance from a B2B2C perspective. The Auto Finance vertical saw an operating growth of 75% with GMV of Disbursement reaching to $44 mn (Mar 2018 annualised). The Insurance vertical saw an operating growth of 243% (YOY) in the number of policies issued and with a growth of 294% in Commissionable Premium stood at $5.2 mn (March 2018 annualized).
Earlier in his career, Mehta was CMO, South Asia for OLX. He drove OLX to be among the most trusted and admired consumer Internet brands of the country and become a market leader in a short span of time.
A campaign that did well on media metrics but failed miserably at driving business results made me ask help from a greater power - data and analytics. This campaign’s failure almost five years back changed the way I decided my media investments (offline or online). This relation keeps on metamorphosing in its sophistication but one that made me understand the isolated impact of media vehicles and the audiences that I have worked for.”
Gunjan Soni is Head of Jabong and Chief Marketing Officer, Myntra. As Head of Jabong, she is responsible for establishing a clear vision for the organization and driving 50% YOY growth for the company. She also looks into the P&L of the Jabong business. At Myntra she is responsible for Marketing across the platform and in-house fashion brands like Roadster.
Soni defines creativity as a wild horse (mind) harnessed through discipline and among the many campaigns that have come to define Myntra, the one that is closest to her heart is ‘Myntra Right to Fashion’ which she says combined good story-telling with the power of an important message. She says, “There are stereotypes around profession or age and gender which restrict and pigeonhole us when it comes to dressing. This campaign done for Independence Day took a light but powerful take on encouraging us to express our individuality through our dressing irrespective of profession, age and gender - so we have unconventional people from an auto-rickshaw driver, a maid to an older person dressing up and making the world see them through fresh eyes.” In her earlier stints, Soni has worked as Executive Vice President for Strategy with Star India, where she drove new initiatives in Content, Sports and Digital. She has also worked as a Partner at McKinsey, where she is credited with starting McKinsey’s Scientific Marketing practice for India. At the beginning of her career, Soni worked with Infosys as a software engineer.
“Marketing is one of the most wonderful and rare professions as it uses both the right and left brain - in turn making a marketing professional’s life richer and eventful. Especially in today’s world, where we have everything from real time tracking and Artificial Intelligence on one hand to some of the most creative mixed media formats to experiment with on story-telling, the real challenge is not to get carried away with the tools but bring them together with creativity.”
At PepsiCo, Maneesha Khanna leads Digital Marketing and Media, both for India and as part of the Global Media & Content COE, driving digital acceleration, scaling digital and ad tech capability, crafting PepsiCo’s data strategy and bringing consumer centricity via the PepsiCo marketing and insights command centre - Pep Pulse, now a global best-in-class example. Khanna has been instrumental behind PepsiCo India winning over 100+ media & digital awards at large industry forums in the last 18 months.
Khanna believes that the steady transition to digital has been one of the most energising journeys with the steepest learning curve. She says, “I’ve been out of my comfort zone since I got on this road but I’m grateful to the forces that be, that put me here. Add analytics, data-driven creativity, a scaled ecosystem and these much loved brands to it, and I know I’m in the middle of a gold mine. One that will only get richer and larger in the days to come.”
According to her, “finding that elusive marketing model today, though it’s also the most exciting time to be a marketer”. She says, “Our attention is splintered a hundred different ways with so much media. All marketing funnels are upside down and consumers aren’t reacting as expected. There’s no singular path to purchase. They don’t walk the line. Cross connections exist between word of mouth, advertising, reviews, content, sentiments, influencers, ZMOT, and back to experiences and services. Can’t miss any element in these hyper connected loops of interactions.”
Through her career, Khanna led large teams across some of the biggest brands in India such as PepsiCo, Nokia, Coca Cola, Docomo, SC Johnson, L’Oreal, Mahindra Auto.
“I’m incredibly proud of Mirinda’s ‘Release The Pressure’ campaign. It has been tremendously rewarding to give an important conversation a big voice and bring it centrestage where it made a difference to teens and their pressures - all the while staying relevant to the brand.”
The industry has become extremely cluttered and the most challenging aspect is how to stand out from the rest,” is how Suveer Bajaj of FoxyMoron assesses the media industry today. Just 30, Bajaj already has over a decade of experience and has worked with a plethora of top-notch brands that include the L’Oreal Group, Castrol, the SAB Miller Group, Fosters, Asian Paints, the Zee Entertainment Group, Bisleri, several brands from P&G, Motorola, Snapdeal, Bajaj, Britannia, Ather Energy, etc.
Today, as co-founder of digital marketing agency Foxymoron (which he set up along with Pratik Gupta and two others when he was just 19), Bajaj’s responsibilities stretch across all avenues - from building the Media Buying and Planning vertical, Search, Data Analytics and Video Content Production and Strategic Alliances. He strategically consults with brands to build the digital architecture and ecosystem for what brands do across digital and new media platforms alongside managing the life-cycle of brands and digital products across the board. The focus is on ensuring that marketing and communication campaigns are ROI-centric, by leveraging the understanding of creative and content along with a strong grip on technology to deliver efficient, unique and logical media solutions. This has helped in the acquisition of clients such as Hershey’s, The Castrol Group, COTY, Burger King, the Discovery Channel Group and GoAir.
A campaign that Bajaj is “most proud about” is one for HBO India for the TV premiere of Suicide Squad. The campaign was executed for only the Mobile platform, utilising WhatsApp as the primary medium - a platform that is used by over 200 million people in India on a daily basis. “We wanted to break away from the clutter by taking the Suicide Squad characters into the audience’s personal space. Hence, we decided to get them to the platform they give first priority to – WhatsApp,” he says.
Gupta’s primary role at FoxyMoron is to look after new business acquisition, strategic alliances and reinforcing the current client roster. This includes bringing the best of digital services to potential and existing clients through creative ideation, effective execution and management of resources.
Prior to FoxyMoron, Gupta worked at Balaji Telefilms Pvt. Ltd. as a Business Development Executive, creating new concepts for potential business opportunities. He has also worked with Castrol India Ltd. where his role included researching market data with regard to the consumption patterns of various vendors that Castrol dealt with.
Liaising with the clients’ agency partners to derive media-agnostic unique solutions has helped establish FoxyMoron as a holistic media and communications agency, going beyond Digital to ATL, BTL, sponsorships, proprietary events and technology.
For Bajaj, success comes from good instinct. “Never overthink anything! You must be willing to embrace the unknown, to experiment with scenarios, be patient and trust that good instinct will help find the way forward.”
In an industry where few Indian PR agencies exist, 23- year old Akshaara Lalwani founded Communicate India as a home-grown Public Relations agency with just Rs 10,000 as capital. Seven years on, Lalwani has built an agency that has over 100 employees and works with MNCs and blue chip companies including Hershey’s, Mindshare, SKF Bearings and The World Bank, among others. Lalwani considers herself a modern day David in the world of media Goliaths!
A recipient of multiple awards, her agenda last year was to move Communicate India away from a traditional PR firm to a digitally transformed, new-age agency. She also developed three new business verticals, growing by 100%, year on year. Reflecting on the many campaigns she has worked on, Lalwani is “extremely proud of” the Lux Golden Rose Awards which reached over 1 billion organic impressions across platforms.
Looking back at a milestone in her journey, she recounts an incident which happened just a year into the business that would define what entrepreneurship was for her. “We were a small team of five people and a day before an important press conference for a leading automobile brand, the entire team quit, barring one person. We also had two events that were scheduled to take place after that. It was at this point that I reflected on what I am really dealing with and what entrepreneurship is all about. It is not about client satisfaction and cheques coming in, but about the darkest of days when you are pushed to think that this could be the end of the road, but you have to motivate yourself to fight it through. Needless to say, we managed to pull off the events and came out stronger than before,” Lalwani recounts.
Being successful is about finding the best in people. Everyone has his/her shortcomings; we need to accept this and look beyond to identify strengths and bring out the best in each person to collectively achieve individual and organisational goals.”
In 2009, Indranil Das Blah co-founded KWAN Entertainment & Marketing Solutions. He played a pivotal role in establishing KWAN as a premier entertainment agency, as well as in its eventual evolution into a diversified entertainment marketplace which connects investors, brands and artistes. Blah was recently promoted as KWAN’s Co-CEO.
What inspired him was watching the movie Jerry Macguire about a sports agent and his relationship with an American football player, played by Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr respectively. “Jerry Macguire made me realize that one, there is a career to be made in sports in India; and two, you can stick to your ideals and values and yet be successful,” says Blah. Today, KWAN works across multiple domains such as celebrity management, live entertainment, sports, TV, licensing, movie packaging, music and regional cinema. KWAN exclusively manages the likes of Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Hrithik Roshan, Sonam Kapoor, Jacqueline Fernandez, Sania Mirza, Shraddha Kapoor & Sushant Singh Rajput, to name a few.
Blah is one of the leading minds in the country when it comes to brand sales, celebrity endorsements, and sports marketing. Under his leadership and guidance, the sports team at KWAN established Ranbir Kapoor’s Indian Super League (ISL) football club, Mumbai City FC, as one of the strongest non-cricket sports brands in India. He also supervises the brand management of Sanjay Dutt’s cricket franchise, Leo Lions, which is part of the Masters’ Champions League in the UAE. He has also been deeply involved in over 200 sponsorship and endorsement deals over the last five years for the various athletes on Kwan’s roster.
In April this year, Kwan Entertainment partnered with sports marketing and entertainment veteran Ravi Krishnan to launch KWANAbler, a new company to provide endto- end support for global sports, media and entertainment brands, companies and investors tapping the Indian market.
For Blah, success is in the detail. “The work dearest to me has been the birth and launch of ISL club, Mumbai City FC. My team and I have been responsible for the brand identity of the club, starting from the logo creation to marketing campaigns across four seasons now. Great detail has gone into making the club recognisable not just in Mumbai but across India and I am happy to say that the club today is a strongly visible brand across the sports and entertainment landscape of India,” he says.
A serial entrepreneur and an angel investor, Sunny Nagpal has successfully built Httpool’s operations ground up in India, as a JV partner, with a paid up capital of Rs 3 lakh to a multi-million dollar enterprise, engaging over 350 top brands, major agencies and 450+ local publishers. Nagpal currently manages Httpool in India and leads its expansion in APAC. He also leads Httpool AdTech Platforms and is involved in development of a cross-channel marketing platform that would enable execution of campaigns across all channels and devices from one single point.
On his journey so far, Nagpal says, “The decision to start my own business before I got tired of learning through jobs was the turning point of my career. My determination to win and patience to work by the book from the ground up was required. I had both. So I got down to business without cutting any corners.”
Among other achievements last year, Nagpal led the pitch and won the exclusive mandate to represent Twitter and resell Twitter ads in India. He cofounded Httpool Indonesia and Httpool Malaysia and also led the winning pitch for Twitter official Ad Sales partner for both these South Asian markets. Within two quarters of the Twitter association, Httpool exceeded expectations on all parameters to the tune of 180% across some markets in the region. In addition, Nagpal was also responsible for establishing exclusive/preferred ad sales partner deals with major publishers and media tech companies like Wittyfeed, Happn and Adara in the Indian market. Httpool in India has registered growth of 55% (YoY) and executed over 3,200 campaigns in the last 12 months from 375+ top brands, engaging all major agencies and co-operating with over 300 publishers. Nagpal successfully led the majority stake sale of Httpool India (as part of a global deal) to IMS- Sony Pictures Networks in 2017-18 (he held 49% in Httpool India prior to acquisition). Outside work, Nagpal loves swimming, diving, playing snooker and writing poetry. He is not just flying high at work but literally too, as he is pursuing a Private Pilot License course at Bombay Flying Club.
For Nagpal, challenges bring success. “Challenges in life have always inspired me. I believe in taking the bull by the horns. Hunt for challenges because that is on which the opportunities ride,” he says.
Hitesh Chawla is the founder and CEO of SilverPush, an AI-driven multi-screen advertising platform. He has been driving the overall vision, strategy and products at SilverPush. Under his leadership, SilverPush has worked with more than 1000 brands and has expanded a true-blue Indian company to eight countries, all in a single year.
Commenting on the firm’s remarkable growth last year and his personal achievement, he says, “My biggest achievement is that I have built an amazing team and the credit goes to the team for the work done. In the last one year, we expanded the company internationally to Southeast Asia and Japan, and in the Africa market. International expansion from India is considered to require a lot of investment. The wonderful part of our expansion was that it was achieved profitably, by signing up clients even before we launched in those countries.”
In addition to expanding to newer markets, Chawla grew revenues by 2.5x last year and doubled the team which grew from 60 to 125 people. The company also raised fresh investment from Japan. He says, “The feeling of creating something meaningful in life, and then being able to grow it is unique. Building a company provides that feeling at every step, since every day presents a fresh set of challenges.”
An important moment for SilverPush came when the company was selected for the 500 Startups accelerator in Silicon Valley. The time spent in Silicon Valley changed Chawla’s perspective on how SilverPush as a company was being built. What SilverPush also prides itself on is that the company has always led the industry with innovations, and this year, another new product is being launched. Chawla has two patents to his name in the US.
For Chawla, success means being constant. “The best advice I got while building SilverPush is to swing for the fences and not sell short. I also draw inspiration from a quote by Walt Disney, ‘The difference between winning and losing, is most often not quitting’.”
Beginning his career in event management, Kunal Kishore Sinha caught the entrepreneurial bug in 2007 when he decided to work on his goal of creating one of India’s largest independent PR agencies. The route he adopted was not to pursue the big companies but instead focus on working with budding entrepreneurs and start-up ventures which was then an underserved category. This also helped him work closely with the founders, initially, as they looked to reach their audience, and then when they eventually became unicorns. Says Sinha, “Focusing on their potential and helping them evolve as category-leading brands worked really well as a Blue Ocean strategy for us and helped us better define what Value 360 stands for.”
Today, under his leadership, Value 360 Communications has had an average run of 22% revenue growth year-on-year for the past 10 years and 400% revenue growth in the last four years.
The company’s work portfolio includes creation of renowned brands such as OLX, Paytm, UrbanClap, goibibo.com, among others from scratch and well-known brands such as Oriflame, Mindtree, ASUS, MG Motor India, ClearTrip, Limelight Networks, Spreadtrum, Barco Electronics, Lego, Transsion Holdings, amongst others.
Sinha’s vision of ‘Go Big Or Go Home’ has also seen Value 360 form a non-equity based joint venture with an independent global communications company, LEWIS in April 2017. This exclusive JV provides global exposure for Value 360 and its clients and is a bridge for LEWIS and its clients who wish to enter the Indian market.
Sinha links his success to that of Paytm. “We started working on Paytm almost four years ago, when it was just another start-up, poised for great success. As an agency, we too were at the threshold of explosive growth. We found the perfect synergy in Paytm’s team which had the same kind of passion and zeal as us to hit some massive milestones. Together, we pulled out all stops to help Paytm break the clutter and become one of the most talked-about brands in the entire country, a great example of how a client and an agency can work together as a team to build a formidable brand.”
I started WATConsult in 2007 as a social media agency, and have never looked back since,” says Rajiv Dingra, entrepreneur and thought leader in the digital space, who started his digital journey at just 20 years of age.
Over the last 11 years, Dingra has worked with more than a hundred global and Indian brands for their digital media campaigns and strategies and under his guidance and leadership, WATConsult has won over 150+ digital and social media awards for work done across distinctive marketing campaigns. What remains a challenge for Dingra is convincing his clients to try the untested. He says, “The biggest challenge is to keep taking risks and doing newer path-breaking work while trying to convince clients to invest in it.”
In 2015, the Dentsu Aegis Network acquired upwards of 75% stake in WATConsult at a valuation of anywhere between Rs 180-Rs 200 crore. In the last one year, under Dingra’s leadership, WATConsult has grown from a 220 member team to 380 in strength. There have been large client wins during this period that include Tata Motors, Panasonic, Piramal Group and PepsiCo India. WATConsult has seen a 60% year-on-year growth in revenues and a 65% year-on-year growth in bottomline. He has also successfully launched services like Research under Recogn and InnoWAT, an innovation lab during this period.
Dingra is also a part of the Digital Council and the Executive Board at Dentsu Aegis Network India. Some of the initiatives that are close to his heart include ‘WAT’s Your Big Idea’, launched a year ago with an aim to provide a unique platform and massive opportunities to the young generation that loves digital advertising and marketing, and #That’sMyGirl, a CSR activity launched on the agency’s 10th anniversary, with an aim to aid education and hygiene necessities of girls in the Primary section (Class I to V) besides donating at least Rs 10 Lakh to Nanhi Kali, an NGO.
As for what drives him, Dingra says, “I think India is poorly represented when it comes to digital creativity and innovation on the global stage. Being a flag-bearer for India’s digital marketing prowess is what inspires me to work harder.”
Dingra’s success is reflected in the success of his campaigns. “Our latest campaign #PowerlessQueen which we did for Project Nanhi Kali is one I’m most proud of. It has won international acclaim by winning a Gold and the Grand Prix at Prague International Advertising Festival.”
Investment banker, private equity investor, value-oriented hedge fund quantitative equity research, trading and portfolio management - with combined experience such as this between them, a career in media might have seemed implausible for Ashwin Suresh, Anirudh Pandita and Aditi Shrivastava. But they did take the road less travelled when they set up Pocket Aces. The emphasis was on building a culture of open feedback, an environment of open disagreement, encouraging a questioning mind and working together as a team.
In just two years, the company has become a leading digital entertainment firm in India by views and engagement metrics. Today, it is a Sequoia Capitalfunded, multi-format, digital entertainment company making highly engaging content for the millennial audience via its socially-distributed channels - FilterCopy, Dice Media and Gobble, and its game show app, Loco.
Pocket Aces crossed the two billion views mark among original content creators and the network currently clocks over 300 million monthly views on Facebook and YouTube. Its channels have crossed seven million subscribers across platforms. Their website filtercopy.com sees an additional eight million monthly traffic while the network reaches over 40 million people on a weekly basis through its social feeds.
The company has also created and distributed web series such as Little Things, the mockumentary show, Not Fit along with What The Folks! and Adulting via its long form content brand, Dice Media. Pocket Aces’ interactive game show platform, Loco, garnered over six million organic downloads within just three months of launch. The app currently has a million daily active users with four million monthly active users. Pocket Aces has worked extensively with advertisers including PepsiCo, Flipkart, Landmark Group, Marico, Kingfisher, AB InBev, etc. to create digital branded content in the country. It is also the first Indian company to syndicate content to China on Youku-Tudou through a partnership with Asia’s leading MCN, WebTVAsia. Additionally, the company has syndicated its content on airlines like Emirates, Etihad, Cathay Pacific, Dragon Air, Jet Airways, and SpiceJet, and other diverse platforms like Ola Cabs, Jio, Hungama, and Dainik Bhaskar.
Working together is its success mantra, agrees Team Pocket Aces. “We have known one another for more than 15 years and this creates a lot of mutual trust, which helps us operate as a team even in the most testing conditions. We chose one another because we agreed on some of the core principles of how to build a company (which is now core to the culture we have built). We can act as the emotional foil for one another, which helps us as we work through the arduous and tumultuous journey of building a company. We regularly question our thinking and thus, decisions that we make are well tested from a strategic and intellectual perspective. We enjoy one another’s company and that was a core premise for starting the firm!” say the founders.
Sameer Pitalwalla co-founded Culture Machine in early 2013 along with Venkat Prasad, with a vision to use technology and story-telling that can help build and create great media brands that people love. Today, Culture Machine’s network includes several prominent ‘Own and Operated’ channels like Being Indian, Blush, Put Chutney, Viva and Awesome Sauce to name a few. Culture Machine’s core technology platforms: Intelligence Machine, Video Machine, and Business Machine, cater to the mission of data-backed content creation, content creation on scale and management of digital content for brands and channels, respectively.
Among the various campaigns and content done by Culture Machine, a piece of work that Pitalwalla is particularly proud of is ‘Amoli: Priceless, a documentary. He says, “Producing India’s first digital documentary on commercial sexual exploitation of children, titled ‘Amoli: Priceless’ that released in seven different languages is something we take immense pride in.” Another campaign which was a feather in his cap was the ‘#MeriDoosriCountry’ campaign for the recently concluded FIFA World Cup. Conceptualized by Culture Machine, in association with the broadcaster Sony Pictures Networks, the #MeriDoosriCountry campaign consisted of a film which showed Indians wearing jerseys of teams appearing in the World Cup
Prior to the inception of Culture Machine, Pitalwalla headed the digital media business at Disney UTV. Earlier, he was the one entrusted with the task of setting up and building the digital video business at the Times Group. While working with the Times Group, Pitalwalla built the video business there with the launch of the first YouTube channel in the country and made it No.1 in terms of viewership for three subsequent years.
Today, Culture Machine is not only doing brilliant work but moving ahead in terms of leading social change within its ranks. The company made news by introducing the first day of period leave #FOPLeave policy for female employees.
Betting big on entirely new concepts has been Pitalwalla’s success mantra. “Let’s throw these videos up on YouTube and see how they do - in 2005, that led to running the most viewed channel on YouTube for three years in a row,” says Pitalwalla.
Prashant Puri runs AdLift, a niche search-marketing firm focused on delivering digital marketing ROI that has grown from a bootstrap digital agency to a multi-million-dollar marketing agency in under five years. Puri is responsible for building the content network, Content Lift, that works closely with leading brands in the BFSI segment and Consumer Goods brands such as Kent RO, Panasonic, Yahoo! and Shopify, to name a few. In fact, in the last one year, Puri led the company’s foray into the BFSI segment with clients such as ICICI Lombard, ICICI Prudential, Max Life Insurance, Bharti AXA & Future Generali now working closing with AdLift for their digital marketing campaigns. Puri also works closely with several Fortune 500 companies including PayPal, eBay, Overstock and Barnes & Noble, in helping them increase their search market share. Last year, AdLift grew by 151% (YoY).
On working in the fast-paced digital domain Puri says, “It’s imperative to be ready, learn, unlearn and relearn as new technologies and platforms are introduced. Moreover, one of the biggest challenges is understanding what platform is working for you and making that decision with data.”
Before he got “a nudging feeling of starting something of my own” and set up AdLift, Puri started his digital marketing career back in 2005, working with InterActiveCorp (IAC – owners of Ticketmaster, Citysearch, Ask, Match). He also had the opportunity of working with some of the most brilliant minds in digital marketing at AT&T Interactive, Yahoo! and eBay on cutting edge search marketing strategies.
Puri is part of Columbia University’s Entrepreneurship Advisory Board (EAB) where he mentors young entrepreneurs to help grow their start-ups more efficiently and effectively.
Puri reaps the benefit of being an early-mover. “I’m extremely proud that we at AdLift read the market signals early on and built India’s largest content generation and syndication platform – Content Lift – very early. We started building Content Lift in 2014 when digital marketing spends were less than a billion dollars in India and time spent on mobile hadn’t surpassed TV time. We envisioned this changing as the time spent on apps such as Facebook catapulted. This led us to believe that there would be an inherent need of quality content providers since consumption of content was about to explode,” says Puri.
Projjol Banerjea heads Zeotap, a company that provides high-quality data for marketing and insights available for more than 200 million consumer profiles. In fact, 40 top global brands used Zeotap’s data in 2017, including blue-chip companies such as Apple, P&G, Samsung, Mercedes and Microsoft.
Banerjea says that over the last two years, Zeotap has helped hundreds of brands reach their desired audiences and extract more value from their advertising efforts. A campaign that illustrates this was done by a leading e-commerce company and its media agency which was looking to increase sales and the most dependable way to reach online shoppers in the 22-40 age range. Says Banerjea, “They selected Zeotap as their partner with the confidence that ID-verified data from the largest Indian telecom operators would ensure high on-target reach (OTR), leading to less impression wastage and better return on advertising spend (ROAS). The results were overwhelming: targeted creatives leveraging Zeotap audience data increased campaign efficiency by over 170% compared to previous campaigns.” What has him excited now is Zeotap’s new Connect product, an on-boarding tool that enables brands to “activate” hitherto dormant offline CRMs in the mobile realm by matching traditional attributes such as phone numbers and email addresses with digital identifiers, in an entirely pseudonymized, privacy-compliant manner.
Banerjea is a successful serial entrepreneur who contributed to two successful exits: Fyber, a monetization platform for mobile publishers and Moboqo, a premium mobile advertising network. Besides being an active angel investor in domains ranging from advertising technology to computer vision to AI-powered CRMs, he recently co-founded innovative Indian feminine care brand, Nua.
Evolution is key to success, says Banerjea. “Long term, with AI, many marketing activities conducted manually today will be handled by machines. As a result, marketing roles for humans will have to evolve and learn how to complement these technologies by bringing in unique human attributes.” such as perception, creativity and critical thought. Additionally, as virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa gain penetration into consumers’ phones and homes, purchases will be made through the recommendations of these agents. This power shift will leave less room for traditional marketing techniques and marketers will have to evolve.”
In 2009, when the world was hit by recession, college batchmates Varun Duggirala and Rohit Raj decided to quit their jobs at Channel V, and set up The Glitch, at a time when nothing much was happening in the digital space. Starting off as a production house for the web, the company evolved into an innovation company for the digital space, then to a digital agency and finally to its current form, a 360-degree integrated communications company. Along the way, Pooja Jauhari came on board as CEO, post a meeting at a marketing conference. With the focus on providing end-to-end solutions for its clients, the creative digital agency, which the founders call “the Swiss Army knife of agencies”, was acquired by global advertising giant WPP and now operates as an independent brand under GroupM.
Today, the agency’s impressive portfolio of clients including Netflix, Nokia, HUL, LinkedIn, PayU, Star India and Marico, among many other international brands from the entertainment, beauty and FMCG sectors.
The Glitch also expanded its content offering by introducing Flux, its content arm, to help brands develop agile content solutions. A big challenge for the team is to balance consumer engagement and meet the brands’ business goals and this drives them to constantly innovate and evolve. Duggirala heads the company’s content as Content Chief while Raj leads as the Creative Chief.
The 265-member strong agency has offices in Mumbai and Delhi currently, and as for the future, it’s eyeing the Bangalore market for an expansion soon along with plans to enter two international markets.
At The Glitch, not just the founders, but the entire team is considered ‘family’, and that makes working together all that more special and fun. As for what is key to their success, here’s what the founders say:
Pooja Jauhari: “Work life balance drives productivity all around.”
Rohit Raj: “Make mistakes.” Varun Duggirala: “Always have stupid ideas & stay paranoid.”
Just before Anant Goenka joined the Indian Express Group, he received a piece of advice from a renowned Indian businessman: ‘Kabhi mat bhoolna ki tum lambe race ke ghode ho’. This sound advice has stayed with him as he chose not to rest on the laurels of the past, but look ahead and build the legacy media group’s fledgling digital business. Following the legacy of Ramnath Goenka, a man who played a noteworthy role in shaping modern India, was no mean task, but Goenka is recognized for converting the editorial and business mindset of a conventional newspaper to a modern, digitally adaptive one that continues to champion its 85-year old history of free speech and courageous journalism.
Over the past five years, the group’s digital reach has grown from four million unique visitors to 70 million unique visitors (Source : ComScore) a month from around the world, becoming India’s second largest digital news group. Its flagship portal www.indianexpress.com is ranked by Newswhip as one of the world’s 25 most engaged websites on Facebook. The group’s Loksatta.com is one of India’s largest Marathi websites and the Hindi news website jansatta.com and English business news website Financialexpress.com are highly rated. On the back of the successful launch of ieMalayalam.com in December 2016, the group built original on-ground teams in Chennai and Kolkata through 2017 to roll out ieTamil.com and ieBangla.com. The focus on increasing penetration in regional languages increased the group’s reach by 25 million unique users per month.
Goenka says his “best career-changing decisions are to do with the best hires” he has done and he attributes his success to implementing the lessons he learnt from his father at an early age in hiring and retaining the right talent. He adds that the key to success is to find a cause that inspires you, not a business case. Goenka frequently writes in The Indian Express and often hosts the popular Express Adda. Looking ahead to the next decade, his goal is clear: “Expanding the reach of Ramnath Goenka’s legacy of fearless and credible journalism globally, through technology as a key enabler.”
For Goenka, success is all about credibility. “The product lifespan of any business in the digital era is very limited. Vox, Buzzfeed, Huffpost - all the best, most admirable digital news brands have either changed ownership or have shown signs of dropping valuation and high cash burns. The only long term sustainable business case that there is, is one of credibility. Our bet for the future is to take our highly credible journalism to multiple regions in multiple languages on multiple formats. And today, with a group reach of 120 million unique visitors (Source : Google Analytics) a month, across the world in six languages, we are very humbled by hundreds of digital advertisers that have put faith in us and encouraged us to continue to combine our journalism with the potential of the digital medium.”
The entrepreneurial bug bit Vinay Singhal and Shashank Vaishnav while they were still pursuing their B.Tech, Computer Science course in Chennai. The duo founded Vatsana Technologies in their hostel room before moving base to Indore. What followed was failure and core learning, and more importantly, acquiring a deep understanding of social media and its workings. Eventually, in September 2014, WittyFeed.com took shape under the aegis of Vatsana Technologies. Recalling the early days, Singhal and Vaishnav say, “We strongly believe that success and failure are vital in the life of a serious entrepreneur. Before tasting the sweet fruit of success with WittyFeed, we have had our own bitter share of failures. But the key is to keep going, but with a broader perspective. Thus, with such an approach, all anticipated guesses turn into fully-formed decisions.”
Vinay Singhal, CEO, advises entrepreneurs to be serial entrepreneurs rather than parallel entrepreneurs and believes in being a change agent. Shashank Vaishnav, CCO, practises sirshasana or headstand when he is stuck for ideas on a crucial business strategy. And Praveen Singhal, youngest of the trio, goes by the moniker Viral King. He is the man who takes care of the creativity, virality and marketing. He is a data analyst who is responsible for studying the audience behaviour to help maintain a better relation with his audience. He is credited as the person who has helped WittyFeed establish a creative platform that helped in content going viral.
Speaking of virality, a campaign which the team is proud of is one done for the athletic footwear and apparel company, Reebok. In the campaign, #GirlsDon’tFight, the brand tried to uplift women and on the back of women’s empowerment, it connected with the TG and delivered. As of today, WittyFeed is a major viral content company in terms of traffic generation and is currently valued at $30 million.
For the WittyFeed founders, video was the route to success. “The idea to create varied form of content through the medium of video, especially the idea of creating sketch videos worked. A series of videos centered on a single theme is always a good idea to encourage discussions on the subject, and often, through varied perspectives. Since we are dealing with a heterogeneous audience, their feedback helps us understand both our own content and our audiences much better,” they say.
Moving into the Branded Content space at Mindshare three years ago was definitely a career changing move!” says Ajay Mehta, Vice-President - Content+, Mindshare. And what a move it turned out to be for the man at the helm of the much applauded campaign, ‘The Brooke Bond Red Label 6-Pack Band’. The campaign - a game-changer in the branded content space - won the Glass Lion Grand Prix at Cannes in 2016, but the real icing on the cake was when the band got global recognition the following year, when they performed on the same stage at Cannes.
Heading Content+ for Hindustan Unilever, Mehta manages a portfolio of nearly 45 brands at HUL across Personal Care, F&B and Home Care and is responsible for providing innovative and effective Branded Content solutions. With his task clearly cut out – to make content mainstream, inspiring and part of everyday conversation at a local and global level within Hindustan Unilever and Mindshare, Mehta has managed to do just that through bold story-telling.
One such example was his conceptualization of India’s first Content Day - a marketplace where top content creators and story-tellers showcased and pitched their best work to the HUL Brand teams.
Mehta’s firm belief that ‘India must inspire the world’, has seen this initiative being exported to other Unilever markets of South East Asia and AAR (APAC, Africa, Middle East, Turkey, and Russia). In fact, Content Day gave birth to iconic campaigns like the 6-Pack Band, Dove Change the Rhyme and The Kissan Tiffin Timetable.
Mehta was also responsible for the Lux Golden Rose Awards 2017, the largest IP created for HUL till date, and the Close-Up Paas Aao campaign, which saw the creation of a music video in collaboration with T-Series, featuring Armaan Malik, Sushant Singh Rajput, Kriti Sanon and Ahmed Khan, which garnered a staggering 60 million views.
Strive for simplicity in whatever you do!
Sairam Ranganathan, or Sai as he is fondly called, currently leads Team Vodafone at Wavemaker India and manages a team of specialists in media, digital, data, content and technology to drive outcomes for Vodafone. “Big Star Wars fan” Ranganathan started his professional journey as a ticket collector in the Indian Railways before making his way to MICA and then starting his media journey.
Ranganathan was a part of the core team which created ‘Vodafone - Unofficial Sponsor of Fans’, a campaign for Vodafone during the last IPL season. Explaining the challenges that Vodafone faced, he says that Jio was the broadcast sponsor for IPL in 2018 and had access to IPL teams by means of sponsoring eight teams, while Airtel was promoting a Free IPL viewing offer with high SOV. On the other hand, Vodafone didn’t have high budgets, or sponsorships or an IPL team association. He says, “Playing on the insight that the ‘Biggest reason for the success of IPL remains the die-hard fans’, we worked with Vodafone to help these fans by creating the ‘unofficial sponsor of fans’ campaign where we crafted a 360-degree marketing campaign. Fans were engaged through various interactive elements like FANtastic Breaks and the FANtastic AC Bus, amongst other elements. The result? Vodafone was the buzziest brand in social (higher than the sponsors of IPL). This also created a record of 25X higher interactions compared to last year, which in turn meant better brand health scores.”
Moreover, Ranganathan led the team which conceptualized and executed the multi-award winning campaign for Vodafone at EMVIES 2017, which ambushed Airtel by targeting areas where its network was weak and showcased relevant communication for Vodafone in those areas, instead.
Ranganathan has also co-authored two books on digital marketing in India – The Curious Digital Marketer and The Curious Digital Marketer 2.0.
Innovate and create disruption through the concept of ‘One Big Idea for Every Brand’.”
Before stepping into his new role as the Planning Head – Ogilvy South, Anirban Roy played a key role in integrating digital ‘thinking and planning’ at Ogilvy Mumbai. At the creative agency’s office in Maximum City, Roy garnered a reputation for being a team player and a ‘good trainer’; guiding the team whenever required, as the go-to man for integrated solutions. Equally competent at classic brand thinking as with digital and modern marketing, and passionate about all the brands that he works with, his ability to simplify Digital has helped the planning team understand and apply digital thinking without being intimidated by it.
In just over a year, he built a team and worked on integrated campaigns for Vivo IPL, Tata Salt and Wild Stone.
More importantly, the team won every single digital pitch they went for. The sweet taste of success came on the back of winning the Bournvita digital pitch, resulting in Mondelez awarding the entire digital mandate for all its brands to Ogilvy India – the agency’s biggest digital win ever. For Roy, creativity means, “Making the familiar new,
For Roy, creativity means, “Making the familiar new, and the new, familiar.” Today, it is not only Ogilvy India, but the global agency, that is familiar with his work. Proof of this, is when in August 2017, Ogilvy’s global CEO, John Seifert recognized 100 people from across the world for their work, passion and commitment, and Roy was one of the few planners on that list.
Keep things simple! Avoid the trap of adding more layers, tools and channels, because the consumer is not remotely interested in being hounded by brands.”
Rohit Dubey is the man behind Parle-G’s last iconic TV spot - ‘Bachpan se bada, koi school nahi’, and the charming quotient of Vodafone’s latest - Ninja Zoozoos. Dubey works on Vodafone, CEAT and Bru - Ogilvy India’s biggest brands and legacies, where his creative spirit provides the much-needed soft palms and strong arms.
Among the work that created more than a buzz, was a work-in-progress-edit, prematurely shared by an overexcited employee, that got over 34 million hits overnight. The message Vodafone conveyed in this campaign, Vodafone #Lookup, was to tell people to keep the phones aside, which witnessed participation from over a 100 million people who pledged to have balanced phone usage. Carrying forward the baton of love for Vodafone Zoozoos, he crafted the extremely popular Ninja Zoozoos for Vodafone. The ongoing ‘Happy to help. In a click’, was one of the most loved campaigns during IPL, and clocked over 10 million views.
Dubey explains, “I am lucky to work on Vodafone where there is a legacy of great work. I have guardian angels and guiding lights. It doesn’t make the task easy, but the creative inertia built over the years takes us forward. Vodafone #Lookup, and Ninja Zoozoo’s - ‘Happy to help’ are close to my heart. However, the one which my team is really proud of, is CEAT-It helps, where we have turned things around in the shortest time, and built a great partnership with the brand.”
On CEAT, he single-handedly changed the face of the brand, making it synonymous with road safety. His campaign ‘CEAT-It helps’ has made CEAT stand head-to-head with MRF, the category leader. With ‘Mr Haath Dikhau,’ ‘Mr Usain Bolt’ and ‘MrNehlau,’ his crafty-satires, married with frozen time-slice cinematography, have made CEAT commercials memorable and award winning.
What is truly laudable is that while patents and copy-writers usually don’t go hand-and-hand, with a belief that innovation is a story in itself, Dubey designed and patented CEAT Safety Grip for women’s safety, which CEAT now mass produces and sells on Amazon India.
Creativity is a lantern which shows you one step at a time. Follow it right, and you’ll navigate your way through the jungle of mediocrity, cynics, naysayers, and the passionless.
Harsh Deep Chhabra , aka HDC, leads the Exchange for Mindshare Fulcrum, which works exclusively for Hindustan Unilever (HUL). His role entails budgeting, planning and executing over 180 annual campaigns - which in sheer numbers is 10% of India’s Adex. HDC was recently presented with the Pioneer Business Partner Award (a Unilever APAC media partner ecosystem award), the first Mindshare employee to win it in the last four years. In the last one year, HDC has shown his vision, knowledge and leadership skills in the following areas:
Media planning process: With 180+ campaigns, the media planning process has to be regulated, yet flexible enough to adapt to changing market conditions. Project De Villiers was devised to revise the current practices with an adaptive system, based on maximizing reach in brand-penetrated households. HDC was responsible for formulating the logic, backend process, data simulations and beta tests till the process was perfected. It was recognized as Unilever’s Best Practice globally.
Budgeting process: The volume of HUL media spends means that budgeting is extremely critical. When the Zero Based Budgeting (ZBB) system came into effect at HUL, it was met with resistance. However, HDC quickly understood the benefits of ZBB and developed a Tracker which detailed the efficiencies and effectiveness of ZBB-compliant campaigns. This was instrumental in spearheading a system of self-regulation within the marketing teams.
Tools deployment: Via automation, HDC – a self-confessed geek, wanted to change the routine work of making television plans - i.e. making logs, building scenarios, making iterations. BEEP, his brain child, is a proprietary tool that creates BARC-based TV plans in five minutes, a process that normally takes six hours. He is now working towards creating media plans requiring zero human interaction.
Marketing MIS: For any one campaign, from brief to implementation, there are approximately 30 people involved across marketing, media, operations, MIS, finance, etc. If we were to look at over 100 monthly campaigns, the scale of people and data generated is humongous. In this scenario, Project Click, an automation project spearheaded by HDC and HUL, brought an automated MIS system in place, which involved speaking to many third party suppliers and getting into the shoes of all the functions. The rollout will be life-altering for Mindshare and HUL.
HDC is also a key member of the team that works on Medianomics, GroupM’s report on media market inflation. He explains, “My work involved establishing the methodology and then setting up systems for authentic and robust tracking. The predictions (AdEx growth and inflation) that Medianomics provides, have now become imperative starting points for many clients for their annual advertising investments and deployment planning.”
For HDC, attention to detail and simplifying tasks is key to success.
For a generation that grew up in the 90s, the name Mayoori Kango evokes memories of a young girl walking down a beach to the tunes of the popular song, ‘Ghar se nikhalte hi’. Giving up the world of glamour, however, she moved to the US in 2005 to pursue her MBA in Marketing and Finance.
A yearning to experiment and widen her scope of learning, led her to choose marketing, and an internship at NBC proved an opportunity to experiment with digital campaigns. Kango reminisces, “The first time I understood how the auction system works and how campaigns work, I thought it was brilliant! It’s like art and science and math all in one go; I fell in love with performance marketing right there and I knew I had to do this - it was the perfect fit for me. And I have never looked back. There is order in chaos and an honesty to performance/ digital marketing that makes it something I really enjoy.” While in New York, she worked with organizations such as Digitas, Resolution Media, 360i.
Under Kango, Performics.Resultrix today is the Number 1 Performance agency as per Google, in terms of a single agency buyer. She helped expand the analytics portfolio of the company by winning the Google 360 Resellers license in India. She also brought in accountability to the performance display business by launching the first Indian agency automated affiliate management system that builds in creative control and fraud detection. Moreover, she helped Performics.Resultrix win and retain prestigious business such as Zee5, Uber, Nestlé and more.
Commenting on the campaigns that she is proud of, Kango says, “We have had many firsts in Digital marketing with some really great clients in India. Be it the launch of Airtel’s music app WYNK, which was launched only on the Digital platform and topped the charts on then app store within two weeks; or other campaigns for Maggi, OLX, Uber, Hotstar and more, there have been some really tremendous campaigns with business success tied to it.”
Be direct. Be honest. Do not apologize for getting it right.
Saurabh Doshi recently moved into a regional role at Facebook as Head of Entertainment Partnerships for Asia Pacific, covering markets like South Korea, South East Asia, China, Japan, ANZ, etc. In this role, he leads Videos & Creators, two of the most important segments for future growth across the region. A top priority for Facebook is the new video play feature called Facebook Watch for long form episodic thematic content and developing the Creators ecosystem on the platform, given that it is a social network platform with a mission to create communities.
Commenting on the future growth drivers Doshi says, “Over the past few years in multiple organizations, a lot of my focus has been on the video and language side of things. I think we are now at the tipping point of both of these, which are growing exponentially. When one looks at videos and languages from the lens of local content and the fascinating work being done by niche and local content creators across smaller towns of India, it appears that we have a revolution coming which will democratize and localize the entire media industry. This is an area which I have been investing most of my time on trying to unlock.”
Doshi was earlier Head of Media Partnerships in India and built a pan India team to work with studios, TV, celebrities and other media organizations. During his stint, Facebook India built a partnerships team working with hundreds and thousands of partners, which included developing and supporting an ecosystem of small content creators and companies and providing solutions for language and niche content. His team was also behind the launch of publishing product, Instant Articles in India, which is now used by a large number of publishers and solves connectivity and loading issues of articles for mobile users.
Moreover, FB Live has changed how Bollywood and the movie industry at large launches assets or announces key milestones and has established a completely new way of having first hand interactions with fans by celebrities.
What we communicate and stand for as a brand, not only defines the product but also influences culture, health and mental wellbeing of people using those products.
A key member of the leadership team at Wavemaker India, Managing Partner Monaz Todywalla currently leads the L’Oréal India business. She played a fundamental role in quadrupling L’Oreal’s digital share from 5% in 2014 to 21% in 2017.
Todywalla has been instrumental in designing and deploying customized client solutions and has played a vital role in retention of existing business. With extensive product knowledge, she has also helped pitch and raise the bar of new business wins and growth by 15%.
Some of the standout campaigns that Todywalla has worked on include the immensely popular Cadbury Dairy Milk ‘Pappu Pass Ho Gaya’ – a campaign that helped the brand make a manifold leap in brand recall, leading to higher sales numbers. Other campaigns that she is proud of working on include a campaign for Saffola – World Heart Day that struck an emotional chord and the Parachute Advanced Ayurvedic Hair Oil campaign. She also fondly recalls the ambush campaign for Vodafone during IPL 11, where the telecom major drove recall with a smaller investment, thanks to some strategic thinking by the team. Moreover, Todywalla also facilitated partnerships with internal stakeholders to create a successful campaign for Vodafone in 2017; with a team that led Vodafone to being bestowed with the ‘Client of the Year’ award at the EMVIES 2017.
Commenting on the challenges of being a marketer, she says, “In a constantly evolving consumer and media landscape, I think that the biggest challenge a marketer faces is maintaining meaningful relationships with customers. This not only means understanding the consumer, but also using data to drive relevant conversations that make the customer stick to your brand.”
Todywalla has also been part of WPP Global’s ‘Walk the Talk’ program, an initiative that empowers senior women leaders to lead the change for its people, as well as clients.
Be true to your business and client.
Candid, Easyday Club, Epigamia, Fair and Handsome Laser, Indian Super League, Laban, Lacto Calamine, MTR Foods – Taste of Home range, Organic India, Paper Boat Chikki, Relaxo Footwear, Sloan’s Pain Relief, Tata Q, Too Yumm, Ultimate Table Tennis League and V-wash Sanitary Napkins – these are just a few brands that Mayuri Nikumbh, Design Director, Elephant Design launched in 2017-18. If this isn’t remarkable enough, Nikumbh, who is part of the branding team at Elephant Design, has also led award-winning work for leading brands like Britannia, Epigamia, Fingerlix, Godrej, MTR Foods, Paper Boat, PepsiCo, TATA CLiQ, Tata Salt and Voot, amongst others.
While every piece of work presents a different challenge, Paper Boat holds a special place in her heart. She says, “A special mention would go to Paper Boat – one of the few brands that took off sheerly on its packaging design, of course, backed with a unique product and brand idea. It is an ideal example of a great idea, great product and great design coming together. Design is core to Paper Boat’s growth and success, which are highly recognized and appreciated by the consumer. As a designer, it is always an innate desire to see the consumer smile with the brand experience. Through Paper Boat, it was impeccably achieved!” Recently, Nikumbh represented Elephant and India at the Asiawide collaborative project ‘Colours of Asia’ where India’s cultural nuances were showcased through five key colours.
It has been Nikumbh’s long-time desire to work on an airline branding project. “The sheer scale and spectrum of the work involved excites me! It provides so many opportunities to create consumer delight through one brand experience. I’ve also always been intrigued by Parle-G. With such an iconic brand and packaging, that touches every segment and geography of the nation, I always wonder what its new avatar would be.”
For Nikumbh, it is the smaller, local brands/ services that she believes can leverage design to another level, making a much larger impact
In 2001, just post the dot.com bust and at a time when Digital marketing was non-existent, Shamsuddin Jasani’s interest in marketing led him to join a startup called ApnaLoan.com, turning down a lucrative job offer from Citibank. However, when he joined the firm as a management trainee, he was put into the Sales division. Within 15 days of joining, he went back to his bosses and told them that he wanted to be in Marketing and not Sales. They offered him a job in the performance marketing area of their business.
Seventeen years on, Jasani, aka Shams, who launched Isobar in India in August 2008, has grown the agency’s billing size from zero to USD 150 million, with staff expansion from a team of just four people to a 200-strong member team. Moreover, he has overseen two successful acquisitions. Jasani also oversees the AMNET operations in India and is a Board Committee member of Dentsu Aegis Network’s Management in India, while leading the charge on Digital as a part of the Digital Council for Dentsu Aegis Network. In addition to this, he also oversees the programmatic operations for DAN in India and under his guidance AMNET has grown over 300% in the last two years. Jasani is one of the few people who has Media Owner, Agency and Client experience.
Jasani has two mantras for success. The first states that we make our own luck. He has never waited for things to happen, but created his own opportunities. Secondly, it is always important to look at the big picture. You might lose some battles and take some punches, but you will always win if you have the ability to look beyond them towards a larger goal.
Impatient, irreverent and idealistic,” are the three words that best describe her, says Faye D’Souza, Executive Editor, Mirror Now. The youngest woman editor of a news channel in India, her restrained anchoring style has helped her break through the world of loud TV news debates. Since its launch in April 2017, Mirror Now has risen steadily in the TRP race. What also helped was the positioning of the channel, to be the ‘voice of the citizen in India’ and focus on the citizens and not politics.
As the host of Mirror Now’s flagship show, The Urban Debate, D’Souza has taken up pressing issues like women’s rights, children’s safety, lower commodity prices, citizen rights and social justice. There is one campaign though, that D’Souza is the most proud of, one that has borne fruit. Says D’Souza, “The story I’m most proud of is the one we did on child locks in taxis. The video went viral and I believe that was an achievement in information. It was picked up only by Mirror Now and we have been actively pursuing the change through the last year. We got in touch with the State and Central Governments and we are now told that the Central Govt Ministry of Transportation headed by the Honorable Minister Nitin Gadkari is putting into action a law that will remove child locks from taxis. If we have managed to save even one person, we would have done our jobs!”
A motivational speaker and regular columnist for the Times of India, D’Souza is currently working on a book on finance for Indian women with Harper collins
“When I was a teenager, my dad once told me that if I live my life by my conscience that’s the only thing that matters. No religious teaching, college education or advice from anyone else can serve as a better advisor than my conscience. I try to live by that.”
The youngest member in Viacom18’s leadership team at just 28 back in 2008, Ferzad Palia heads the Youth, Music and English Entertainment clusters at Viacom18 Media, heading MTV, MTV Beats, Colors Infinity, Comedy Central and VH1. Palia was part of the four-member start-up that brought VH1 to India in 2005. In 2010, when he became Business Head, VH1 was transformed into a music and entertainment destination with large-scale multi-platform properties. Under his leadership, VH1 witnessed an impressive rise in revenues and has become one of Viacom18’s most profitable brands. In the English entertainment cluster, Palia drove the launch and growth of channels like Comedy Central and Colors Infinity.
Looking back at the launch of Colors Infinity, Palia says, “We created differentiation by bringing in Karan Johar and Alia Bhatt, thereby introducing the concept of curators for a channel. The campaign was extremely powerful and helped us establish Colors Infinity not just as a new entrant into the game but clearly a top player very quickly.”
Following his success with the English Entertainment Cluster, he was given the additional responsibility of heading the Youth Entertainment Brands - MTV and MTV Indies in late 2015. In 2016, Palia expanded the MTV footprint in India by launching MTV Beats, a 24x7 Hindi music brand with a focus on Bollywood. His role has been further expanded to include two new businesses as the network dials up its content and music offerings.
“I was 19 and worked at J. Walter Thompson, when Axe was being launched in India. We came up with the idea of creating the world’s longest dance party in Delhi, which went into the Guinness Book of Records. I strategized the entire activation for Axe and it was so successful that we ended up doing it across multiple markets.”
Nandini Singh Divan took on the role of Business Head for Star India’s Hindi GEC Star Bharat earlier this year. Having joined Star India in 2005 as Senior Manager, Research and Consumer Insights, Divan says that the different roles she has worked in at Star are what drive her growth in the network. “A mammoth organisation like Star gives us the platform to straddle completely different roles. I have worked across content and front line sales, running and delivering business across niche channels in English entertainment and mass brands like Star Bharat,” says Divan.
She has been instrumental in developing a strong sales portfolio for regional channels like Star Pravaha. Prior to her current role, Divan led Star’s premium portfolio of channels - Star Movies, Star World, Star Movies Select HD and Star World premiere HD - for four years. She says, “During my stint at Star English, I had the good fortune of launching Star Movies Select, which was aimed at targeting the viewers of the English movie category. Viewers were tired of the lack of content and freshness on the English movie portfolio at that time. Star Movies Select launched with the premise of showing them a new story every day with the tagline that promised ‘365 days-365 stories’.”
“I had spent five years in Star running programming strategy and research and took a leap from content to frontline sales in 2012. Moving to sales set me up for a career in general management and running businesses. The idea is to learn as much as possible throughout your career. The day you stop learning is the day you stop growing.”
When Meghna Ghai’s father, filmmaker Subhash Ghai asked her to fulfil his dream of building the best film, communications and creative arts institute in the world, the then 21- year old jumped at this opportunity. This laid the foundation for Whistling Woods International (WWI). “As I started to research and work on the plans for the institute, I realised that this was the place for me, since it enabled me to contribute to the dreams of numerous, talented aspirants,” she says.
Today, the 5.5 acre WWI campus holds top rate amenities and infrastructure – such as Sony & Red HD Digital Cinematography Cameras, 40 x 60 Film Studio, Animation & VFX labs, YouTube Space Mumbai, Whistling Woods JIO VR Lab - for students to learn the change they aspire to bring. Over the years, WWI has partnered with various technology brands like Sony, Adobe, Foxconn, Apple, Cannon and Red Cameras. Recently, it also set up the Whistling Woods JIO VR Lab, which will help to bring in state-of-the art technology, workflows and global best practices into the Indian VR ecosystem.
Ghai is also the driver behind WWI’s CSR programmes where scholarships are offered to underprivileged students who are passionate about the media and entertainment industry.
‘Do What You Love. Love what you do.’ I truly believe in this mantra quoted by Steve Jobs and implement the same at work. According to me, talent can bring you success, but for long-lasting success one needs to be consistent; and this consistency can be achieved if an individual pursues a career they are deeply passionate about.”
Vinoth Chandar is the Founder, CEO & Creative Director of ChuChu TV, a cluster of YouTube channels designed to engage children through a series of upbeat songs and colourful animations. What started as an endeavour to create a video to amuse his daughter, whom he lovingly called ChuChu when she was a toddler, led to the making of ChuChu TV. It not only changed Chandar’s life, but also the lives of children across the world. In four years, ChuChu TV has become the fastest growing edutainment YouTube channel in the world. In terms of numbers, Chandar’s YouTube channel, ChuChu TV hit 10 million subscribers with 154 videos. ChuChu TV is the third largest YouTube Channel in India and recently became the #1 YouTube channel worldwide in the kids’ entertainment category.
For someone who believes that creativity is a journey, not a destination, there are big plans in store for ChuChu TV in the future. With Chandar at the helm, ChuChu TV tied up with SkoolBo, an American pre-school education company, to start a new YouTube channel which focuses on content that improves reading, mathematics, languages, science, geography, music and art for preschool children.
“If you want to start your own business, choose one where you control the core,” says Chandar. For his achievements, YouTube honoured Chandar and his team with the Diamond PlayButton. “As a team, we have always believed in quality over quantity and it has held us in good stead!” he adds.
Sattvik Mishra, Rishi Pratim Mukherjee and Sriparna Tikekar’s vision has resulted in youth media platform for social news & entertainment ScoopWhoop Media, which today has 400 million monthly content engagements spread across platforms and demographics. Targeted at the 16-35 demographic, it reaches millennials across three digital publications ScoopWhoop.com, Vagabomb.com, and ScoopWhoop Hindi (ScoopWhoop’s Hindi publication).
Mishra, who is in the role of CEO, started ScoopWhoop.com as an experiment along with the others in August 2013 with no intention of being an entrepreneur or starting a company. For six months, he did his day job at an advertising agency and moonlighted as the CEO/content writer for ScoopWhoop. In 2014, ScoopWhoop went from an experiment to one of the leaders in the media-publishing space.
Mukherjee, the company’s COO, earlier worked at Webchutney as an account director and overlooked digital and social media marketing for brands like Bacardi, Coca- Cola and Max Group. When not at work, he can be found exploring historical places around the country.
Tikekar is the Chief Content Officer and leads a team of over 80 people across Mumbai and Delhi to create evocative content that is interesting and entertaining, all the while being #sorelatable. She has to her credit pioneering innovative video formats for ScoopWhoop such as animated adult fiction, documentary, and fun fiction content around relatable ideas like the ‘desi mom’, launching India’s first openly feminist commercial magazine (Vagabomb), creating content for Hindi-speaking millennials largely misunderstood by mainstream media. ‘Gazabpost’ is ScoopWhoop’s fastest growing brand at 10 million MAUs (monthly active users) in just two years. Prior to ScoopWhoop, she worked as a copywriter with McCann Worldgroup where she created advertising campaigns for brands such as Reckitt Benckiser, Nokia, Reebok, Coke, Perfetti, SREI, and UNICEF. She is also deeply passionate about animal rights and has created a safe space for many street animals, right inside ScoopWhoop’s Delhi headquarters
Tikekar’s success mantra is, “Never get too comfortable. Nothing grows in the comfort zone.” It is no surprise then that the work they are most proud of is the documentary by the ScoopWhoop team on Kashmir. “They put their lives in danger to capture what goes on during Friday protests in Kashmir, where the situation turned hostile with stone pelting and ensuing tension. It was incredibly brave of them,” says Tikekar.
So far ScoopWhoop has raised more than US$ 6million from Kalaari Capital and Bharti- Softbank, making it one of the few media companies in India the market is ready to back.
Prashan Agarwal is the CEO of music streaming company Gaana, which has close to 60 million unique listeners every month with a growth of 6x over the past two years. Under his leadership, Gaana has been leading penetration of music streaming in Tier II and Tier III towns, thereby creating tremendous value for the music industry and all its constituents in the form of monetization and recognition. Gaana has launched many industry-first initiatives like Gaana Voice Assistant, Identify a Song, Gaana Specials, Day/ Night theme, Google Auto / Google home integration, Amazon Fire TV and transliteration in 14 languages. Agarwal also envisioned and created Gaana Originals. He says, “I am extremely proud of what has been our initiative to build a platform for distribution of non-film music under the brand Gaana Originals. We launched Gaana Originals last year with a slate of 11 top singers and helped them reach more than 100 million streams in less than five months, a feat comparable to the biggest Bollywood albums. We will continue to invest in such initiatives to get recognition for the music fraternity beyond Bollywood.”
Digital will continue to bring the world closer and hence the entire music catalogue of the world will be enjoyed across audiences of different demographic profiles and music tastes. Music consumption is expected to shoot up as it becomes omnipresent and platform agnostic in people’s lives, thus driving up revenues and engagement for all stakeholders.”
In the midst of the over-the-top shouting matches that have come to dominate television news, Zakka Jacob’s assertive yet calm demeanour has helped him create a niche for himself in the competitive and rating obsessed primetime slot in the English news genre. Jacob, the Deputy Executive Editor at CNN-News18 and anchor of 8pm show ‘Faceoff Tonight’, specialises in the Foreign Affairs beat and has been fronting the channel’s coverage on various critical geo-political issues. He believes that Television is a great opportunity to tell the stories of real people, real hardships and real aspirations, while also holding those in power accountable. As to how he sees the future of Television News in the Digital era, he says, “Content will always have a future. Content makers will always be needed. The medium may change, from TV to Digital, but the yearning for information and opinion, credible and fast, will always remain.”
Jacob believes in really living life, when he’s outside the studio. “You have to be a bit eccentric to be a journalist, but never take your job too seriously. Always have a life, a decent set of friends and hobbies, outside of the newsroom,” he says, recounting the best advice he ever received.
Connecting with real people in his 15+ years of experience, Jacob is adept at both, doing the show from the studio and also from the ground, in the middle of the action. Case in point, when the Jallikkattu protests happened early last year, Jacob hosted his nightly debate show in the midst of over one lakh people at Marina Beach, Chennai.
Since taking over as the Business Head, Zee Hindi Movies Cluster in 2013, Ruchir Tiwari has expanded the portfolio from just one channel – Zee Cinema – to a seven-channel strong bouquet (Zee Cinema, &Pictures, Zee Classic, Zee Action, Zee Cinema HD, &pictures HD, Zee Anmol Cinema). The Zee movie cluster is a critical business of ZEEL, one that commands a good 35% in the paid channel category, as per the network. Says Tiwari, “In an industry where the success rate is really low, the extraordinary success of Zee Hindi movie channels, and the satisfaction that it brings along, has been the biggest driving force for me.”
Under Tiwari, Zee Cinema was at the forefront in strategically acquiring popular South titles and creating a space for them in the HSM market – a game changing trend for the industry, as this content now occupies around 50% content airtime in the category. Under his leadership, the specialized niche channels like Zee Classic and Zee Action witnessed a growth of over 100% in terms of market share and viewership, respectively. Tiwari identified potential demand for Indian cinema and thus spearheaded several acquisition alliances. Tiwari is particularly proud of the 2013 launch of &pictures - a premium Hindi movie channel targeted at the urban audiences, which seized a significant 8% market share, within nine months in the category.
A career shift from marketing to content has to be the single most important moment of my life that propelled things in the right direction and I have never looked back ever since.”