Sai Karthik Joins Ulka As SVP And Head Of Strategy, South

Sai Karthik, senior vice president and head of strategy, South, at Ulka

Ulka, part of BBDO Group India, has appointed Sai Karthik as senior vice president and head of strategy, South, reporting to chief strategy officer Saad Khan.

Joins from: Talented
Reports to: Saad Khan, chief strategy officer, Ulka
Experience: over 15 years across network and independent agencies
Earlier: 82.5 Communications, McCann, Dentsu, M&C Saatchi, JWT
Also founder of The Hidden Slide, a community for strategists and researchers

The Work Sai Karthik Brings With Him

At Talented he led Urban Company’s Dignity of Labour, The Hindu’s Written by Journalists and Zee5’s Apni Bhasha, Apni Kahaniyan. As senior strategy planning director at 82.5 Communications he worked on Himalaya, Costa Coffee and Unibic.

That is an unusual pairing. The Talented work is the sort that wins at award shows on the strength of a cultural argument, and the 82.5 accounts are steady mainstream businesses that need the argument to move volume. Agencies rarely find both in the same planner.

Why The South Gets Its Own Strategy Head

Jitender Dabas, chief executive officer of BBDO Group India, said a strong planning leadership in the South is critical to the group’s ambitions in the region, and pointed to Bengaluru and Chennai as the headquarters of businesses the agency wants to partner.

He also made the newer argument out loud, calling the South the epicentre of India’s startup and new-economy ecosystem. Read plainly, this is a role created as much for the client list the region is producing as for the clients already on the books.

A Strategy Bench Being Rebuilt In Public

Dabas described the group as building, under Saad Khan’s leadership, what it intends to be one of the strongest strategy communities in India. Karthik, for his part, referred to Ulka’s bold rebuilding vision and to a rare combination of experience and newness.

M Damodaran, president and head of the Bengaluru office, welcomed him to the city and singled out the mix of traditional and new-age agency experience. The through-line in all three sets of remarks is the same: this is a network agency openly hiring against the independents, and saying so.