MAM
Coca Cola wins Cannes Lions 2013 Creative Marketer of the Year award
MUMBAI: Global beverage giant, The Coca-Cola Company, has been chosen as the recipient of the Creative Marketer of the Year Award at Cannes Lions 2013. The award comes as recognition of the company‘s history of promoting creative excellence in its communications and marketing endeavours.
The award, earlier known as the Advertiser of the Year Award, is presented to brands that have distinguished themselves by inspiring innovative marketing of their products across multiple platforms and who embrace and encourage creativity in their brand communications produced by their agencies.
The Coca-Cola Company won its first Cannes Lion way back in 1967 and has won more than 100 Lions for different advertising and communication disciplines since then. It won the Design Grand Prix in 2008 for the US entry Coca-Cola Identity and in 2012 it won the Outdoor Grand Prix for its Coke Hands initiative in China.
Cannes Lions chief executive Phillip Thomas said, “The Coca-Cola Company‘s restless pursuit of creative innovation in the marketing of its brands across multiple platforms in many different territories has been honoured at Cannes for many years. Most noticeable, when looking at its Lion winners, there is the perfect balance between the careful, consistent management of global brands and freedom given to local teams to adapt and innovate for their markets.”
Coca-Cola Company executive vice president and chief marketing and commercial officer Joe Tripodi of said, “Creativity has been and always will be at the heart of our brands. It fuels our business – with consumers, customers, fans, agencies and partners all over the world. We are honoured by this recognition and grateful to our agencies and partners who inspire and make us better.”
Since the manufacture of the now famous contour bottle in 1916, Coca-Cola has consistently maintained a strong brand identity with a focus on design. The company‘s advertising, always an important and exciting part of its business, came into its own in the 1970s with the brand‘s iconic 1971 Hilltop commercial – where a group of young people from all over the world gathered on a hilltop in Italy to sing “I‘d Like to Buy the World a Coke.”
Brands
Tessolve lands a semiconductor veteran to drive its next big push
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, who started his career at ISRO and has spent 35 years building chips and companies, joins the Bengaluru-based firm as president and chief operating officer
BENGALURU: Tessolve has never been shy about its ambitions. The Bengaluru-based engineering services firm already counts 18 of the world’s top 20 semiconductor companies among its clients, employs more than 3,500 engineers across 12 countries, and last year pocketed a $150m investment from TPG. Now it has hired the executive it believes can turn those assets into something bigger. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, a 35-year semiconductor veteran who once built satellite payloads for ISRO and has since scaled engineering organisations across three continents, joins as president and chief operating officer, effective immediately.
THE MAN AND THE MANDATE
The appointment is, by any measure, a serious hire. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu comes to Tessolve after senior leadership stints at HCL Technologies, Altran and Wipro, where he managed large profit-and-loss portfolios and oversaw cross-regional teams. Over the course of his career, he has been instrumental in bringing more than 1,000 new products to market across the high-tech, energy and manufacturing verticals. Before the private sector claimed him, he began his working life as a scientist at the Indian Space Research Organisation, contributing to research and development in charge-coupled device technology and satellite payloads, a foundation that shaped everything that followed.
In his new role, he will lead Tessolve’s global growth strategy: expanding its engineering capabilities, deepening customer relationships and accelerating innovation across semiconductor and high-performance computing domains. The brief is broad, but the context is specific. Tessolve operates in the $550 billion global semiconductor market, and its recent moves, the acquisition of Germany’s Dream Chip Technologies and the TPG funding round, have sharpened both its reach and its expectations.
Srini Chinamilli, co-founder and chief executive of Tessolve, is characteristically direct about why Ravi Kumar Chirugudu was the choice:
“As we scale our global semiconductor and system engineering capabilities, Ravi’s appointment marks an important step forward. As global semiconductor demand continues to accelerate across industries, it is creating significant opportunities across the semiconductor lifecycle, from design, packaging, validation and systems integration. Ravi’s deep knowledge and leadership in this ecosystem brings the right mix of industry expertise, customer connect and execution capability, which will play a key role in strengthening our position as a trusted global engineering partner and reinforcing our market leadership.”
THE NEW ARRIVAL SPEAKS
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, for his part, frames the move in terms of timing and culture, two factors that veteran executives tend to weigh as heavily as title or compensation:
“I am happy to join Tessolve at a time when the industry is rapidly evolving towards more complex, AI-driven systems. What stands out to me is its strong people-first culture and its commitment to bringing value to its customers. The strength of its global team, combined with its deep expertise in semiconductor innovation and next-generation product engineering, creates a solid foundation to build differentiated, scalable solutions. I look forward to working closely with the team to drive strategic growth and strengthen its role in shaping the global semiconductor ecosystem.”
The reference to AI-driven systems is not incidental. The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a structural reshaping, driven by the insatiable compute demands of artificial intelligence. For engineering services firms like Tessolve, which offers end-to-end capabilities from silicon design to packaged parts and invests in high-performance computing, high-speed interfaces, photonics and 5G, the moment is both an opportunity and a test. The company says it is well positioned to capture the next wave of industry growth. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu is now the person who has to prove it.
He came in from outer space, literally, and spent three decades learning how the semiconductor industry works from the inside out. Now Tessolve is betting that accumulated knowledge can help it cross the next frontier. In the $550 billion global chip market, the gap between ambition and execution is measured in engineering hours and leadership quality. Tessolve has just gone shopping for both.
