Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) will set foot into India November 17, 2008.as speculation has been, Priti Nair, Subhash Kamath and Partha Sinha will be the ones in charge.
The move to enter India is due to the fact that BBH’s global clients have been increasing their presence in India in recent years. Although the agency has produced some campaigns for India out of its Singapore office, it is felt that the bigger opportunity creatively and commercially merits presence within India. These include the Axe/Lynx commercials.
Priti Nair joins from Grey Worldwide where she was national creative director. Previously, she was Executive Creative Director at Lowe Mumbai and Delhi and also spent time at Chaitra Leo Burnett (now Leo Burnett India.) Through her career Nair has worked on numerous brands which include Greenply, Camlin, and Idea Cellular. Nair has won many national and international awards including wins at Promax, Asia Pacific Advertising Festival, New York Festival, as well as Abby and Clio awards.
Subhash Kamath with over twenty years of experience in advertising steps in from Bates 141, where he was the group chief executive officer. Kamath has been through the three mergers and acquisition that Bates 141 has undergone in the last couple of years. His career has also included stints at Ambience Publicis, Trikaya Grey (now Grey Worldwide) and Ogilvy.
In his previous stint, Partha Sinha was chief strategy officer at Publicis for South East Asia. A graduate from IIT and MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, Sinha has worked with Zee Telefilms as director of marketing and strategy, Ogilvy as vice-president planning and Citibank as a marketing manager.
In an official communiqué Simon Sherwood, BBH Group chief executive officer, says, “This feels like putting down the final piece of the jigsaw. When we started building our global model 12 years ago, we weren’t sure how many locations we would need to provide a footprint that basically matched our global clients. What’s become increasingly clear, is that India absolutely has to be one of those places.”
The London headquartered agency is more comfortable with starting a BBH office from scratch and the challenge so far has been to find a group of people who can present its values and DNA in building a company, and who can work together to provide the brand of leadership it needs, and who can build a business with an enviable reputation for creativity and innovation.
“And in finding Priti, Subhash and Partha we feel exceptionally confident about our prospects. All three are very highly talented and all three are exceptionally likeable people. It’s a very exciting time for us. I now believe we can better support our global clients and more effectively compete as a future facing creative business,” says Sherwood in a press statement.