Euro RSCG beefs up creative department; hires Sujit Unni as CD

Euro RSCG India has hired ex-O&M staffer Sujit Unni as creative director at its Mumbai office. Unni, who quit O&M in mid-February, has joined Euro with effect from March 29, and reports directly to Ashok Karnik, vice-president – creative, Euro RSCG India.

“While creative directors Sanjay (Khare) and Deven (Sansare) already work as a team on special projects for all the Euro offices in India, Sujit will work with me as a creative director, exclusively for the Mumbai office,” explains Karnik.

Karnik reveals that the decision to get Unni on board was based on the agency’s desire to strengthen its creative department across offices. “The focus of the agency is to strengthen the product, and Sujit clearly has the ability to improve our creative output,” he says.

He adds that the agency has plans to add more people to the team. “It’s always nice to have fresh talent as it helps our existing clients as well as in getting new business. So, I am meeting people,” he says.

Unni, for his part, maintains that Euro presented an opportunity that he found hard to resist. “Euro has a lot of potential, it has some very good clients, and is aggressively going after new business,” says Unni, who has a brace of silver Lions (won for the ‘asterisk’ ad for Cancer Patients Aid Association at Cannes 2003) under his belt.

“Euro is also investing heavily in creative, and my brief was to raise the bar. I saw that I could contribute to the agency’s creative evolution in a very basic way, so the challenge in being in Euro is more attractive than in being at a place that already has a lot of credits for itself.”

Incidentally, Unni started his advertising career with MAA Bozell in 1997. In two years, he moved to TBWA India (then TBWAAnthem), before moving to O&M in 2000. It was at Ogilvy that he formed a partnership with Santosh Patil, and the duo produced a fair amount of work for clients such as CPAA, STAR TV and Playwin.

In fact, the Cannes-winning ‘asterisk’ ad for CPAA and the acclaimed ‘spoof’ campaign for AdAsia 2003 were their joint creations. Remind him of his award-winning work and quiz him on what one can expect from him at Euro, and Unni simply says, “Let’s see. The desire is to do great work, but it’s the results one year from now that would really speak.”

Meanwhile, agencyfaqs! has heard that Euro RSCG India is also in the process of making a couple of senior-level appointments (both in creative and account management) in Delhi. So watch this space for more...

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