By A Correspondent
With operations kicking off recently in Mumbai, Bangalore-based creative agency Happy has welcomed Siddhartha Roy as their first Chief Operating Officer. In a short span of five years, Happy has grown to a team of over 30, and a newly appointed COO marks the beginning of big things to come from the Idea Shop.
Mr Roy or Sid, as he is fondly known, will be responsible for Happy’s operations across branches. He has over 16 years in the business, of which 10 years were spent with Ogilvy in Mumbai, Bangalore and Sri Lanka. Besides Ogilvy, he has worked with Ambience and Everest as well as loyalty marketing specialists, DIREM.
He has been associated with a diverse spread of categories and brands such as FMCG (Cadbury, ITC Foods, Nestle, Coke, Ceylon Tobacco Company), Telecom (Hutch/Vodafone, Reliance, Sri Lanka Telecom), Web (Yahoo) and Retail (Madura Garments). His contribution extends to several campaigns that have been awarded for not only marketing effectiveness but creative excellence as well. In Phoenix Ogilvy – Sri Lanka, Sid set up & headed the Strategic Planning cell along with leading Account Management.
“I think there are seismic changes taking place in the business of communications today. Gone are the days of agency imperialism. While marketers are looking for ‘ideas’, large network agencies are increasingly selling ‘processes’. And over the past few years, Happy has been successfully capitalizing on this need-gap. This is the primary reason for me to join the HAPPY family – and I’m extremely excited about it,” said Mr Roy.
“Kartik and Praveen have been doing a fabulous job over the past few years to create and keep conversations alive around Happy with their work. My mandate at Happy is to partner them in augmenting the same while driving business efficiencies,” he added.
On the new appointment, co-founder and CEO, Kartik Iyer commented: “Praveen and myself have done things by ourselves so far. We think it’s time to take a more structured approach to reach our goals. He comes with the right level of experience combined with the hunger to do the unexpected – this is very much the DNA of Happy. Known as the ‘oldmonkster’ among friends, we think he is the perfect fit as our COO. We welcome him and are very confident this addition will take things to a whole new level. In fact, it already has.”
Happy is responsible for the much appreciated Flipkart campaigns featuring little kids which won a silver at the Asia Pacific Adfest in Pattaya this year. They are also well known globally for their ‘Lee – Never Wasted’ shopping bag design, which won them a Cannes nomination. Happy was also the agency behind the highly acclaimed Incredible India tourism commercial titled the ‘post card’.
1. Better devices