Campaign India Agency Report Card 2010: Bates141

Type of agency: Advertising

Company ownership: WPP

Key personnel: Sonal Dabral, chairman, Sandeep Pathak, CEO, Manosh Mukherjee, COO, Dheeraj Sinha, CSO,  Sagar Mahabaleshwarkar, NCD, Vijay Singh,MD,141 Sercon

Accounts won: Colgate Palmolive, MTV, Max Bupa, Zen Mobiles, Monte Carlo, Fortune India, TVS Motorcycles 

Accounts lost: Maa Juice (CavinKare), Dabur Oral Care (realignment due to Colgate), Nirula’s, Amante

Sagar Mahabaleshwarkar moved from Rediffusion to Bates 141 as national creative director in April this year, while Russell Barrett and Karan Rawat moved out of the agency to BBH and Grey respectively. Other appointments across the country included Kaushik Ghosh as vice-president, account management, Sailesh Wadhwa as group strategy planning director, Kaizad Pardiwalla as executive vice president, Mumbai operations, and Abhinav Pratiman as senior creative director,  Mumbai; Vaasu Gavarasana joined as executive vice president, Sambit Mohanty as executive creative director, and Vijay Simha and Rajesh Gola as creative directors in Delhi. On the awards front, it seemed a good year, with wins at Cannes, Spikes Asia, and Goafest. The Virgin Mobile ‘Indian Panga League’ campaign won the Yahoo! Big Idea Chair award at the end of the year. Other campaigns created by the agency were for Zen Mobiles, Fiat Linea T-Jet and Monte Carlo.  There was good, visible work for Max Bupa. The agency also opened an office in Bangladesh to service the Marico account.

How Campaign India rates the agency: 8

How Bates rates itself: 8

This year, in terms of recognition and fame, has been the best year for us. 4th highest in Goafest in shortlists, 6th in the overall tally. This year also, we brought home our first Simba from Cannes, not to mention a One Show, a D&AD, and a London International award. The toast of the year was the Big Idea Chair Win at Yahoo! Awards and the Gold and the Silver Effie all for our Virgin Mobile IPL campaign. The endeavour going forward is to increase our tally on both fame and effectiveness and continue doing work which stays true to our “Change Thinking” philosophy. We believe that 2011 is going to be an Orbit Shifting year for us and we have in place a robust three-year plan that will help us achieve that. We believe the aggregation of right nucleus of people and clients is happening at Bates 141 which will be the driving force for the agency going forward into the next three years.