Medulla makes three new hires, sets ‘creative leadership’ team

After creating a mark for itself on the global stage of healthcare communication, Medulla Communications is now taking the battle for talent to mainstream agencies 

 

Medulla has beefed up its creative team by roping in Abhinay Patil and Ritu Sinha as creative directors Subhas Franklin as  senior director, Consumer Healthcare. The trio have joined from Grey, Contract and DDB Mudra Group respectively.

 

Patil and Sinha join Vinayak Shinde, creative director, Medulla in the creative leadership team at the agency. Amit Akali continues to lead the team as CCO.

 

Speaking with Campaign India, Praful Akali, founder-director, Medulla Communications, explains that the agency has roped in talent from mainline agencies to augment its fire power while pitching against mainstream agencies for new business. 

 

He says, “With the appointments, we now have the talent that a mainline agency would be proud off. Getting them into specialists was difficult. We had also tried to bring in talent like this in the past, but didn’t succeed. The folks we were getting weren’t as talented or not the dream team we wanted.”

 

Akali claims that the agency has been able to rope in the talent because of a cumulative effect of the awards it won last year. The awards he refers to include the agency’s ‘Healthcare Agency of the Year’ title at the Cannes Lions in 2016.

 

Medulla Healthcare currently has about 60 employees.  The agency claims to have 15-20 clients on a retainer basis.

 

“We have built the agency ground-up. We’ve made junior and mid-level hires too recently. We are well differentiated for the pharma clients and consumer healthcare clients. The work on consumer advertising has been sporadic since we have been competing with mainline agencies too. Now, we have a package that includes folks from these agencies and are ready to do consumer advertising. We want to get a lot more businesses now, especially on consumer healthcare advertising,” says Praful Akali.

 

After bagging the agency of the year accolade at Cannes Lions last year, expectations would be high again this year. Praful confesses that he doesn’t expect results to be matching last year’s level.  He says “We have entries that are being put together for Cannes. The past year we have focused more on the business and expanding the team. We did things for the long term business perspective and invested a lot more time on that. We’ve built our credentials on the awards front, now we want to convert them into work."