Profile – Sandeep Vij: "I encourage making mistakes"

The chief executive officer, DDB Mudra Group, and chief knowledge officer, Mudra Group has had an interesting career graph that brings him to where he is today

Sandeep Vij has come a rather long way from his 'aimless' college days. The chief executive officer, DDB Mudra Group, and chief knowledge officer, Mudra Group, dabbled in chartered accountancy for three years, before dropping out to get into advertising after being coaxed by a friend (Aughi Dalton, the then copy chief at Frank Simoes).

"I remember him telling me, 'You really want to be an accountant, or what?' And I bought into his 'bullshit' that I belong in advertising!" Vij bursts out laughing.

What followed was a job offer by Paul Nayyar, as a trainee in media planning at Clarion in 1984. It turned a carefree guy into a hardworking one. Vij became 'that guy who never lifts his head from his desk'. The job paid him a salary of Rs 450 a month.

When Tara Sinha, the head at Clarion, formed Tara Sinha Associates (now McCann Erickson), almost the entire top management at Clarion moved out. Vij, too, was offered a go at TSA, but the branch head, Sudhir Lal, persuaded him to stay back. Vij was made the media manager at Clarion then, which meant he was to head the media department. "From just a trainee to media head in one year…that was the fastest jump ever!" he grins.

The year 1988 was a turning point for Vij when ex-Clarion boss Madhukar Kamath, who had recently joined Mudra, invited Vij to join the agency's strategic planning department in Delhi. Vij was sceptical about joining an 'uncool', Ahmedabad-based agency. On a work trip to Ahmedabad, Vij, keeping Kamath's offer in mind, decided to check the agency out while he was there.

At Mudra, he happened to meet IIM doctorates Dr. Ramachandran, Dr. Naganand and Dr. Arun, along with AG Krishnamurthy. "They stunned me. There was this fire in their eyes, a burning energy, a powerful sense of mission," Vij recalls. He found himself saying 'yes' the same day.

On joining Mudra Delhi with only a handful of people at the branch, Vij found the agency to be an ambitious one. It was full of bright underdogs who wanted to take on the biggies. "My job in account planning actually meant 'pitching' as there were hardly any accounts we had at the branch then!" says Vij. During his tenure there, the agency grew from strength to strength after it cracked a campaign for Binnie's called 'Humko Binnie's Mangta!', which fetched it the much-needed spotlight and accounts - like Nestle and Frito-Lay.

In 1991, Vij attended a seminar by Ogilvy's direct marketing guru, R Sridhar. He came away with the idea of starting a direct marketing wing and set up Mudra Diversified Direct, at the age of 30. However, in 1993-94, with the advertising industry picking up steam and growing at 40 per cent year-on-year, he felt like he had to be part of the mainstream business again. "So I shifted back into the mainline agency, under Rahul Kansal, where I co-headed the Delhi branch with Santosh Desai," Vij says. After Desai moved on in 1996, Vij took over the branch. By 2000, Vij had converted the Delhi operations into a Rs 100 crore one, with many awards to boot.

In the late '90s, bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, Vij teamed up with Sreekant Khandekar - another CA dropout, incidentally - and the two started agencyfaqs.com (now afaqs!) as a media exchange site, which later went on to become an advertising, media and marketing news portal. "I quit Mudra (as COO, Delhi) in 2000, six months after starting agencyfaqs!, as we were in the midst of obtaining funds for the site," Vij remarks.

However, Mudra wouldn't go away from Vij's life. Two years later, A G Krishnamurthy, who was heading Mudra, rang him up, asking him to head OMS, the media arm of Mudra, as president. Since agencyfaqs! was under control, Vij quit working fulltime there to take up the OMS offer (though he continues to be a shareholder and a director at afaqs!).

Vij handled OMS up till 2005, which is when he was absorbed back into the main agency, which was suffering from a churn in the management. In 2008, Vij was made the chief knowledge officer at the Mudra Group, where he looked after the Knowledge Management Initiative. This year, he was made CEO of the DDB Mudra Group (with four SBUs under it - DDB Mudra, Tribal DDB, Rapp India and Mudra Health & Lifestyle). "The pressure is of a different sort, but the cross-learning is much more," Vij shrugs.

Barring his first brush at Clarion and two years with agencyfaqs!, Vij has stuck it out with Mudra for around two decades. So what kept him there? "The agency has given me 'the freedom to fly and the freedom to fall'" – a DDB mantra as well, by the way.

Vij is fond of soccer and cricket and loves travelling. He also practices what he calls 'digital meditation'. One wish he hopes to fulfil soon is to play the organ someday. Vij would also like to try entrepreneurship again, particularly the creation of a product which is the first mover in a new category.

"I encourage making mistakes as that's the way to really learn," Vij sounds off his success mantra. "I vibe by what Mahesh Murthy wrote 'Ready, Fire, Aim'."