Sudha Natrajan and Raghav Subramanian quit Lintas; Manas Mishra roped in as president

Mishra's appointment comes in the wake of a couple of high profile resignations at the agency: Sudha Natrajan, chief executive officer, Lintas Initiative Media and Raghav Subramanian, who recently joined Lintas Media Group as chief operating officer, Lintas Initiative Media, have both called it quits.

The duo is poised to launch their very own venture called TMC Corporation, an umbrella company with five brands under it, namely, 'The Media Café', 'The Media Consultants', 'The Media Consumer', 'The Media Calibrators' and 'The Media Content'.

"There are five different full forms for the acronym 'TMC'," explains Natrajan, "which is why we chose this as the name of our venture. We tried to get a little creative with the name."

A press note explains the functions of each: The Media Café holds the right side of TMC while on the left side all key areas of expertise are covered. The Media Consultants is a strategic brand consultancy offering, The Media Consumer is a research offering (on both media and consumers), The Media Calibrators will apply brand and business analytics, while The Media Content will merge brand messaging and content.

Natrajan and Subramanian will be known as the founder-directors of TMC Corporation, which is a 50:50 venture.

Explaining each partner's role, Natrajan tells afaqs! that while she brings to the table creative, marketing and strategic acumen, Subramanian has research, analytics and business skills to offer. "It's a mix of both our skill sets," she says.

She goes on to explain that TMC Corporation will not function as a regular media agency. "We're not a media agency," she clarifies, "We will not make media plans, we will not do media releases and we will not buy media."

Rather, TMC Corporation will operate as a comprehensive, specialised media offering and strategic consultancy that will dip its fingers into what Natrajan terms 'cerebral work'. This includes path-breaking consumer research and statistical modelling, amongst other such offerings.

Natrajan feels that a lot of the research that currently happens in India is obsolete and that not enough is being done to understand emerging consumer segments, let alone correlating the same to media. Thus, TMC Corporation will attempt to bridge this gap. The founder-directors believe that there exist a lot of analytics that India has not seen till date. Their consultancy will thus bring into the Indian media market things that are both new and ahead of their time in terms of pure insight.

The first edition of the venture will be launched in Gurgaon this August.