Ulka appoints Sai Karthik as SVP and head of strategy, south

Bengaluru: Ulka, the BBDO Group India agency with a taste for old-school craft and new-economy ambition, has pulled off a sharp bit of talent poaching. Sai Karthik walks in as senior vice president and head of strategy, south, and the timing could not be racier. The south is where India’s startups are minting brands by the week, and Ulka wants a bigger slice of that pie.

Karthik’s job is deceptively simple on paper and fiendishly hard in practice: sharpen creative effectiveness and scale up business across the region’s marquee accounts. He reports to Saad Khan, chief strategy officer at Ulka, in a reporting line that signals just how seriously the agency is treating its southern expansion.

The hire brings pedigree. Fifteen-plus years across network and independent shops have given Karthik a portfolio that reads like an awards shortlist: Urban Company’s Dignity of Labour, The Hindu’s Written by Journalists and Zee5’s Apni Bhasha, Apni Kahaniyan, all conceived during his stint at Talented. Before that, he ran strategy planning at 82.5 Communications on brands including Himalaya, Costa Coffee and Unibic, with earlier turns at McCann, Dentsu, M&C Saatchi and JWT rounding out a genuinely agency-hopping CV.

Karthik himself sounds energised rather than diplomatic. He talks of a “bold rebuilding vision” in the south and an appetite to push strategic boundaries, praising an agency culture that mixes seasoned hands with fresh energy. That is not boilerplate: legacy client relationships built on trust are hard currency in adland, and Ulka is clearly banking on them.

Jitender (Jeetu) Dabas, chief executive officer of BBDO Group India, frames the hire as part of a bigger play, building what he calls one of the strongest strategy communities in India under Khan’s watch. His logic is regional and pointed: a beefed-up southern planning bench makes global and national clients sharper and more culturally attuned, while giving Ulka the depth to court Bengaluru and Chennai’s biggest businesses. With the south now the epicentre of India’s startup economy, the prize is not small.

M Damodaran, president and head of office, Bengaluru, Ulka, is characteristically warm, welcoming Karthik’s curiosity and contemporary outlook to what he calls a brand with rich legacy. Beyond the day job, Karthik also founded The Hidden Slide, a community for strategists and researchers to swap ideas and needle each other’s assumptions, a useful signal of the intellectual restlessness Ulka is buying into.

For an agency chasing India’s fastest-growing regional economy, this is a tidy bit of business.