O&M elevates its group CDs

Sumanto Chattopadhyay (Sumo), Abhijit Avasthi, Rajiv Rao and Anup Chitnis, group creative directors at the agency, will now serve as executive creative directors for the agency’s South Asian operations

O&M India, which is also responsible for the operations of the South Asian region, including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, has announced some elevations in its creative team.

Sumo

Sumanto Chattopadhyay (Sumo), Abhijit Avasthi, Rajiv Rao and Anup Chitnis, who have so far been group creative directors at the agency, will serve as executive creative directors for South Asian operations.

In this role, apart from performing their current responsibilities, Avasthi and Rao will supervise the creative that flows out of the Pakistan branch, and Sumo and Chitnis would be in charge of the creative work at Ogilvy Sri Lanka and Ogilvy Bangladesh.

Abhijit Avasthi

Sumo has been with O&M since 1993, when he joined the Kolkata office. In 1994, he shifted to the Mumbai office. For the last three years, he has been looking at the creative work that moves out of the Kolkata office. In 1997, he moved to Sri Lanka office to oversee the creative product from that branch, and has been shuttling between the Mumbai and Sri Lankan offices ever since. He has been working on HUL’s businesses, Videocon, Kodak, Mattel and Tea Board of India, among others.

Avasthi has been with O&M for eight years now; he joined the agency as creative supervisor in 1999. He has been in the advertising industry for 10 years, and worked with Enterprise Nexus (now Bates David Enterprise) before he joined Ogilvy. With Ogilvy, he has worked on accounts such as Fevicol, Asian Paints, Motorola, Bajaj Pulsar, Cadbury’s, Kotak Mahindra Bank and Perfetti.

Rajiv Rao

Rajiv Rao, began his career in advertising in 1994, and has been with agencies such as Ambience Advertising (now Ambience Publicis) and Heartbeat. He joined O&M in 1999 as creative group head, and has worked on businesses such as Hutch, Lenovo, Allen Solly, Brooke Bond and Titan. He has also been at the agency’s Bangalore branch for a while with his creative partner, the late Mahesh V.

Chitnis, on the other hand, is a new entrant in the O&M team, having joined the agency about two years ago as senior creative director. He was elevated to group creative director last year. He has worked on campaigns for SBI, Cadbury’s, Parle and Huggies. He began his career in advertising in 1991, and has served at Rediffusion and Mudra for six years each. He has also had a short stint at Saatchi & Saatchi. He also directs in-house films and was behind the two films for Radio City – ‘Kutte ki dum tedi ki tedi rehti hai’ and ‘Baal baal bach gaye’.

Anup Chitnis

Commenting on this move, Piyush Pandey, vice-chairman, Asia-Pacific, says, “These are extremely well-earned responsibilities that are in keeping with our commitment to a shining creative product across South Asia. This also reflects our commitment to the career growth of our people.” The agency is also looking forward to appointing a worldwide creative head for Lenovo soon.

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