Parveez Shaikh quits Contract; agency to get a replacement "soon"

After spending nearly all his advertising career - spanning nine-odd years - with Contract Advertising, Parveez Shaikh has quit the post of creative head at the agency's Mumbai office. In a surprise development, the soft-spoken Shaikh - best known for his sparkling copy and his sophomore looks - put in his papers two weeks ago. He will, however, be with Contract till the middle of next month.

Parveez Shaikh leaving Contract might seem surprising to most people, but Shaikh admits that the thought has been on his mind for some time now. "I have been thinking about this for a while now, but somehow, I never got down to taking any concrete decisions as things just kept coming up at office, one after another." Shaikh, who took a longish European holiday after attending this year's Cannes Advertising Festival, agrees that the holiday helped settle the matter. "While on holiday, I thought quite a bit about it and decided that if I wanted to do it, I might as well do it and get done with it," he says.

The question that remains, of course, is why? "There's no specific reason for quitting Contract," Shaikh clarifies. "It's just that I wanted to take a break from what I have been doing all these years. In fact, I want to take a break from advertising, but for now, all I can say is I want to see how things go." A break from advertising! Does that mean bidding goodbye to agency life? Shaikh won't say for sure. "I haven't decided where I'll be; a lot depends on how things happen. I will be taking a few weeks off to sort it all out."

Shaikh is keeping his cards fairly close to the chest. But he admits that he has "a few options" open. In the same breath, he dismisses rumours that speak of him moving to head creative at… "Yes, there are some strange rumours that even I have had a chance of hearing," he cuts in. "I wish some of those rumours were true," he adds with a laugh. Of course, Shaikh is the first to admit that working in another agency is going to be hard. After all, ever since he enrolled for the Windows training programme (pioneered by the late Subhas Ghosal and the late Larry Grant) in 1994, Shaikh has been associated with Contract, starting life as a trainee and working his way up to head the agency's creative department in Mumbai. "Contract is a great place, and it's the only place I know," Shaikh points out. "It's not going to be easy working anywhere else."

If Shaikh is going to miss Contract, Contract too will miss Shaikh. "I am losing a good friend and the agency is losing a good creative person," a colleague acknowledges. "Parveez will be missed at Contract, there is no doubt about that," says Rajiv Sabnis, senior vice-president, Contract Advertising. "But then that is life. People come and people go. The best we can do is hope that we will find someone who can adequately fill his shoes."

Yes. For Contract, Mumbai, getting a replacement for Shaikh is top priority. It's not as if the office does not have someone senior in creative - in fact, Associate Vice-President (creative) Raj Nair shared the responsibility for the Mumbai office with Shaikh. "Functionally and operationally, we had two heads in creative - Parveez and Raj," Sabnis explains. "Plus there are quite a few people in the ACD and senior CHG levels. But we do need someone senior to take charge from Parveez. In the interim, however, Raj will oversee the whole operation."

Sabnis further points out that Shaikh's replacement could be "an individual or a team". He reveals that the agency has "identified some people", and would be in a position to announce names "soon enough. Hopefully, we will make the appointments while Parveez is still with us, so that the transition happens smoothly. But the coming on board can take time." © 2003 agencyfaqs!