Campaign India Agency Report Card 2010: OMD

Type of agency: Media

Company ownership: Omnicom 

Key personnel: Jasmin Sohrabji, managing director; Harish Shriyan, managing partner

Accounts won: Reliance Communications (shared with MEC), Multi Screen Media, Cleartrip, SAH Petroleum, Paramount Farms, Renault-Nissan, Puma, Lotte, Sify, Teamlease, Venus Water Heaters, Sangam India, Ferrero Group, Hindustan Pencils, Cotton World; Digital- Unilever, monster.com, Dr Batra’s, Royal Sundaram and Indiainfoline.com 

Accounts lost: None reported

That the relatively young OMD is giving its more established competitors many a sleepless nights can be vouched for by the time it took for Unilever to decide where to park its India media business. It was a long drawn out, closely contested fight and OMD came away from that pitch with the digital brief for the FMCG behemoth. It has set its sights firmly on landing more global business. Within India, it won the Reliance Communications business along with WPP agency MEC, which was a massive win. As was the Renault-Nissan business, an Omnicom global alignment. Talent retention has been consistent. New talent on board includes Kavitha Srinivasan as general manager for Chennai; Lalit Agrawal as general manager in Mumbai; Chanchal Shaktawat as business director, Subash Franklin as Strategic Planning Director for Bangalore; Subrata Roy as General Manager- Digital in Mumbai and Pankaj Parihar as business Director, Digital among others. The agency has grown its employee strength and added an office in Ahmedabad. As OMD’s worldwide CEO Mainardo de Nardis said in an interview to Campaign India recently, their team in India is disproportionately large to the size of their operations at the moment, which says a lot about the size of their ambitions for India.
How Campaign India rates the agency: 9

How OMD rates itself: 10
OMD has had a dream run this year.Growth was stupendous and beat industry averages manifold, at an impressive 121%. Big new business wins including Reliance Communications, Ferrero, Renault-Nissan, MSM (Sony), cleartrip, have cemented OMD’s position in the big league. This was the first year of big award wins for the agency.
Multiple large wins in the Digital space have established OMD Digital as a digital agency to reckon with. Unilever, cleartrip,monster.com, ICICI, HCL are only some on our roster. Biraja Swain, the head of OMD Digital was shortlisted as Agency Head of Year 2010 at DMA APAC, the only Indian to make it to the list. OMD Digital Mumbai has also been shortlisted as Digital Agency of Year at Campaign Agency of Year Awards 2010.
While the top team all stayed on to build OMD from strength to strength, the Agency, showing foresight, vision, and its big ambition, also put a strong second line team in place across offices and functions with 9 key hires in 2010. 
 It’s been a year of growth and consolidation on all fronts – new business, talent retention, awards and recognition. A year which has cemented firmly the strong foundation laid in 2009, and saw the Agency claim its rightful place as an industry front-runner in all respects.