Karishma Gupta marks six years at Ogilvy, gets nostalgic on LinkedIn

NEW YORK: Karishma Gupta traces her career back to a 30-second advert that stopped her in her tracks at 17, not because it sold anything but because it said something. Seventeen years, three countries and five industries later, that instinct for a single clear idea has taken her from management consulting and an MBA at Queen’s University’s Smith School of Business, via a postgraduate stint in communications management at MICA, to the top strategy chair at one of advertising’s biggest names.

Six years ago, in the thick of covid, Gupta walked into Ogilvy Mumbai from brand marketing, with no particular conviction she would stay. The anniversary fell on 23rd June: 4.7 years in Mumbai followed by 1.3 and counting in New York, one company holding the thread across two very different cities. In Mumbai she drove integrated marketing for Unilever stalwarts including Ponds, Red Label, Taj Mahal, Hellmann’s and Lakme, alongside KFC, Pantaloons and Fiama, work that helped land a Cannes silver, eight regional Effies and a Guinness World Record for the largest environmentally interactive billboard. She now leads global brand and creative strategy out of Ogilvy New York, running the playbooks for Coca-Cola and Haleon.

Gupta puts the longevity down to people rather than the job itself. In Mumbai, she singles out Ganapathy Balagopalan for teaching her to think rigorously and hold out for the right answer long after everyone else had settled, and Prem Narayan for a knack of taking something tangled and handing it back simple, in a way that pushed her to raise her own game. Madhukar Sabnavis gets a category of his own: the strategist who built Ogilvy Mumbai’s planning function from scratch, leaving his fingerprints, in her telling, on every framework she now reaches for.

The move to New York brought a fresh set of names into the story. Gupta credits Anibal Casso with being among the sharpest minds she has encountered in the industry, and Rachel Pool with showing her what leadership looks like in an unfamiliar market and a new chapter altogether. Her client-side and agency cv stretches wider still, spanning frozen foods in Canada, beauty across Indonesia, Singapore and India, toys and burgers in India, and tea across Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan, the kind of multi-market mileage that earned her a place on Ogilvy Asia’s 30 for 30 list of top women advertising leaders for the Asia-Pacific region in 2023.

Gupta says the experience has reshaped how she thinks about staying in one place. She once assumed longevity was for people who had stopped dreaming. Six years, three countries and a fistful of effectiveness awards later, she has landed on a different theory: sometimes the dreaming continues just fine, provided you have found the right place and the right people to do it alongside.