MAM
Siddhartha Roy is ‘Happy’ COO
MUMBAI: Bangalore-based creative agency Happy has appointed Siddhartha Roy as its first chief operating officer in Siddhartha Roy.
Roy comes in from Phoenix Ogilvy, Sri Lanka where he set up and headed the strategic planning cell and also led account management.
The agency has recently started its Mumbai operations.
As part of his job profile, Roy 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 & Everest as well as loyalty marketing specialists Direm.
Happy co-founder and CEO Kartik Iyer commented, “Praveen and I 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.”
Roy said, “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 capitalising on this need-gap. This is the primary reason for me to join the Happy family – and I’m extremely excited about it.”
In his career of 16 years, Roy has been associated with brands across diverse categories like FMCG (Cadbury, ITC Foods, Nestle, Coke and Ceylon Tobacco Company), Telecom (Hutch/Vodafone, Reliance and Sri Lanka Telecom), Web (Yahoo) and Retail (Madura Garments).
Five-year-old Happy is responsible for the Flipkart campaigns featuring little kids which have been widely appreciated by the audiences and award juries. The agency also has a role to play in the ‘Lee – Never Wasted’ shopping bag design which has won them a Cannes nomination. Its other piece of work was the Incredible India tourism commercial titled the ‘post card’.
Brands
Faber-Castell India appoints Sunaina Haldar as director – marketing
With stints at Tata, SleepyCat and ADF Foods under her belt, Haldar is primed to redraw Faber-Castell’s brand story
MUMBAI: Faber-Castell India has poached Sunaina Haldar from ADF Foods, appointing her director – marketing as the German stationery brand looks to muscle up in a category that is rapidly reinventing itself around creativity and self-expression.
Haldar hit the ground running. “My first couple of weeks have been incredibly energising, understanding consumers, visiting markets, engaging with retailers and immersing myself into the world of Faber-Castell Group,” she said.
She arrives with considerable firepower. At ADF Foods, Haldar ran marketing across India and international markets for a portfolio spanning Ashoka, Aeroplane, Camel and ADF Soul. Before that, she was vice-president – marketing at direct-to-consumer mattress brand SleepyCat, where she helmed brand, content and performance marketing. Her résumé also includes a stint leading marketing, new product development and CRM for Tata SmartFoodz at Tata Consumer Products, no small proving ground.
Between corporate roles, Haldar also operated as a fractional CMO for early-stage startups, building marketing strategy and operational structures from scratch, a signal that she knows how to move fast with limited resources.
With 18 years straddling FMCG, D2C and the startup world, Haldar now takes the reins at a brand that has long owned the classroom but is clearly hungry for the living room. In a stationery market where the pencil has become a lifestyle statement, Faber-Castell has picked someone who knows exactly how to sell that story.
