Campaign India Agency Report Card 2010: Iris

Type of agency: Advertising and Integrated Marketing

Company ownership: Independent (iris Worldwide)

Key personnel: Alok Lall, managing director, Kenneth Augustine, NCD, Ashish Mathur, senior VP Experiential, Ram Krishna, AVP, Digital Strategy and Josh Thomson, CEO of APAC

Accounts won: Integrated marketing agency - Coca Cola, Dell Computers, Avaya; Centum U (Advertising and digital), MTS (digital), Alpha G Corp (advertising and experiential), Mankind Pharma (advertising)

Accounts lost: None reported

Starting from one client in 2009, namely Microsoft, iris has spent the better part of 2010 steadily notching up new business wins ranging from Coca Cola to Dell Computers to Mankind Pharma among others. Staff strength has risen to about 60 people from the small team that they had, last year.

The departure of Ranjeev Vij (back to BBDO) who was on the agency’s board was a setback. Key hires this year include Sudeep Bhattacharya as creative director, Arun Negi as digital creative director, Kush Srivastava as client services director and Ranadip Baruah as AVP, Experiential. Sony Ericsson has globally aligned with iris worldwide and in India too, the agency has added up decent amount of business from advertising to experiential to retail. They have additionally notched up business from existing client Microsoft.

iris spent 2010 consolidating their business. The big issue? Most of their wins are projects.

How Campaign India rates the agency:7

How iris rated itself: 8

The first three years of iris in India has seen us establish really firm foundations. As the fastest growing independent agency network in the region, we’ve seen a 120% growth versus 2009 with our headcount since launch growing from 8 people to 60. We’ve attracted some of the industry’s top talent. Our investment in talent, especially in the areas of digital and experiential, has helped us to win big ticket clients like Coca-Cola, Dell, Avaya, Centum U, MTS, Alpha G Corp and Mankind Pharma. We also increased our remit from existing clients like adidas, Shell and Sony Ericsson and Microsoft.

We’ll continue to provide truly integrated solutions by offering both multiple specialism and the ability to blend it efficiently and effectively around a client need. We believe this will be the agency model of the future.We believe that the way we have structured ourselves underscores our intent to establish iris as the agency network model of the future – an independent outfit that is agile and client centric.