YAAP appoints Sambit Mohanty as group chief creative officer

MUMBAI: YAAP, the Mumbai-based digital marketing network that floated on the stock exchange earlier this year, has lured Sambit Mohanty away from McCann Worldgroup to serve as its group chief creative officer, a hire that signals the company’s intent to compete on creative firepower as much as algorithmic grunt.

Mohanty brings more than two decades of experience across some of the world’s weightiest agency networks, including JWT, DDB, Bates, Elephant Design and most recently McCann Worldgroup, and a trophy cabinet that would embarrass most creative departments. His “Shagun Ka Lifafa” campaign for Ujjivan Small Finance Bank scooped a Gold Lion at Cannes, a Grand Clio, multiple D&AD Pencils, Asia-Pacific Effies and the Jay Chiat Award. More recently, his “Dabba Savings Account” work for ESAF Bank collected honours at Cannes Lions, D&AD and the Global Grand Effies.

The appointment lands at a charged moment for YAAP. Fresh from its public listing and the acquisition of GoZoop, the company now runs eight offices across India, the UAE and Singapore, employs more than 400 people and is pushing hard into the Middle East and South-East Asia. It bills itself as a purely digital outfit that fuses data, AI-powered technology and content to serve global, multinational and local clients alike.

Atul Hegde, founder of YAAP, was characteristically bullish. “The next decade of marketing will not be won by media alone, technology alone or creativity alone,” he said. “It will be won by organisations that can bring all three together.” Hegde added that he believed India could produce globally influential marketing companies and that Mohanty would be “pivotal” to that ambition.

Mohanty, for his part, invoked the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti in his first public words as a YAAP executive. “The future is now,” he said, noting that the old boundaries between advertising, content, social media, creators and technology had collapsed. “YAAP has built a strong foundation with an entrepreneurial mindset, digital DNA and an appetite for disruption.”

In his new role, Mohanty will oversee creative vision across the YAAP network, weaving together brand storytelling, social, content, influencer marketing, technology and AI-powered creativity into what the company describes as a unified offering for the modern marketing era. His brief spans the full breadth of YAAP’s operations across India, the UAE and Singapore.

For a company that made its stock-market debut barely months ago, landing a Cannes Gold Lion winner as creative chief sends a clear message: YAAP is done playing small.