Challapalli Kalyan is disruption head at TBWA

Kalyan comes from Contract Advertising, where he was head of strategic planning

TBWA has found its head of disruption in Challapalli Kalyan, who joins from today. The position was left vacant after Narayan Kumar left the agency towards the end of 2008.

Shiv Sethuraman, chief executive officer, TBWA India has been on the lookout for the right disruptive mind for a long time. He is glad that his search ended with Kalyan, who comes with nearly eight years of experience in the advertising industry.

Challapalli Kalyan is disruption head at TBWA

Earlier, he was head, strategic planning at Contract Advertising's Mumbai office for the past 20 months. This was Kalyan's second stint with the agency. He joined the agency in 2005 and quit a year later to head the consumer planning and research division at Diageo.

"Kalyan is a serious practitioner of disruption," says Sethuraman, who was keen on bringing aboard someone who doesn't view disruption as just another planning tool.

Kalyan has a dual role. Apart from heading disruption nationally, he will also be the head of planning for the Mumbai office. His mandate will be to drive disruption and make it far more visibly relevant and demonstrate the power of the tool, says Sethuraman.

Sethuraman feels that though disruption is actively a part of the present brands that TBWA works on, it hasn't been taken to the next level and he expects Kalyan to do just that.

Kalyan had a brush with copywriting as well in his younger days in Hyderabad, with a local agency.

Of his new journey, he says, "The aim is to practice disruption with purity and a lot more depth."

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