CVL Srinivas, COO, north and south, Madison Media, puts in his papers

CVL Srinivas, chief operating officer, north and south, Madison Media, has put in his papers. With this move, Srinivas will pull the curtains on his five-and-a-half-year-stint at Madison. Confirming the move, he said, "I had an extremely fruitful innings at the agency. Whatever I am today is largely because of the freedom and opportunity that this place has offered me. At this point, I have a couple of options, though I have not frozen on any one of them."

Srinivas, however, refused to say anything about his next stopover. It is also not known who will take over the mantle from him at Madison. All Srinivas would say is, "We have some very senior people at the agency. So I don't see a problem whatsoever. There would definitely be some restructuring at the agency given that we have grown so much in size and given the kind of accounts that we have with us now."

An engineering graduate from BITS (Birla Institute of Technology & Science), Pilani, Srinivas started his career at the Sundaram Clayton group company TVS Electronics as an engineering trainee. Two years on, he quit to pursue a management degree at XLRI. On passing out in 1993, he decided to take up media as a profession and joined Lintas (now Lowe, which has since separated the media wing under the aegis of Initiative Media), Bangalore. After a year, he quit the agency and joined the media team at HTA (now JWT).

Srinivas was part of the start-up team that set up Fulcrum in 1995. He saw the agency grow over the next three years, till 1998. "Interestingly, between 1993 and 1998, at Lintas and then at HTA, I largely worked on Brooke Bond. I was also part of the team that did the media for HLL's Pond's brand," reminds Srinivas.

The Madison offer came his way in May 1998, and Srinivas joined the Mumbai team to work on three main accounts - Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Godrej - for the first six months there. In January 1999, Punitha Arumugam joined Madison to look after the Mumbai operations. Srinivas was transferred to Delhi with the brief of supervising the Coca-Cola account (Coca-Cola was headquartered in the city then) and "growing the Delhi and Bangalore branches". When Coca-Cola shifted base to Mumbai two years back Srinivas continued to service the business out of Delhi. "The division was no longer geographical, it was more or less based on accounts," explains Srinivas.

From a single-client office in 1999, Madison Media's Delhi office now counts Perfetti, Domino's, ABN AMRO and Somany group among its clients, while Bangalore has Nissin Foods, IFB and BPL on its roster. "I have been here for more than five years now and I guess it's time to move on," says Srinivas, who will clear his desk at his Delhi office by "end September-early October". © 2003 agencyfaqs!