Aditya Chatterjee
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Rediffusion on a hiring spree; Shruti Jain, Rajesh Kumar quit

Ninad Satpute, Ajay Gahlaut and Sudip Bandyopadhyay join the agency, while Ravi Chandran of TME has quit

Rediffusion DY&R is seeing a whirlwind of activity these days. If on one side, senior managers such as Shruti Jain and Rajesh Kumar have quit, the agency has also managed to bring in credible replacements in the form of Ninad Satpute, Ajay Gahlaut and Sudip Bandyopadhyay.

Shruti Jain, as a general manager, was responsible for a substantial portion of the agency's non-Airtel business. The brands that she handled included Godfrey Philips, R K Marbles, tractor brand Ford New Holland, and W, the women's wear brand. Her last day at Rediffusion was June 30.

Rajesh Kumar, vice-president, was a circle co-ordinator for the Airtel business across the six offices of the agency, besides Delhi.

Ninad Satpute, who has worked with Maruti Suzuki and ICICI earlier and is an IIM alumnus, has been roped in place of Kumar. However, Satpute will have a different role to play as account planning director.

Satpute, according to informed sources, will be responsible for making sense of consumer and industry data pertaining to Airtel across the agency's offices. Having worked on the client side for years and that too on diverse products such as automobiles and banking, Satpute is expected to bring in the 'client's perspective' to the table. He will be reporting to Amandeep Singh, the planning director at Rediffusion.

In an unrelated development, Ravi Chandran, a senior manager at The Media Edge (TME) has also put in his papers. The development closely follows TME appointing Shan Jain to head the agency's Delhi operations.

Rediffusion, meanwhile, has also decided to fill up a long-standing void in its creative set-up by hiring Ajay Gahlaut and Sudip Bandyopadhyay from O&M. As executive creative directors, the duo will be responsible for the creative output of Rediffusion's Delhi office. At O&M, Gahlaut and Bandyopadhyay had worked on the Hutch account. It will be interesting to see their work on Airtel now.

Besides the appointments at the senior positions, six more executives have been hired as account manager/account director levels.

Recently, a leading pink paper had reported about Diwan Arun Nanda's – for the uninitiated, he is one of the Indian promoters of Rediffusion – ambition to get the agency back at the top. Will these appointments achieve that objective?

We promise to keep you posted.

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