04 Jul 2017

5 Problems with your Content Marketing – All with C!Talk about digital marketing and the word content flies around like a bee buzzed on beer. Everyone agrees that content is king and that SEO and SEM are the ones that will get the clicks and the conversions. But is that true? What If you’ve got all the right buzzwords in place, and tagged the right hashes. And yet you don’t seem to be ...

28 Jun 2017

Did you just have a brand moment?Everybody talks about what their brand stands for. Large campaigns are devoted to clever tag lines and signature statements. Lavish events launch the campaign and… then… all…of…it… dies… down. Settles into normalcy. Into the daily humdrum.And then you see one irate customer venting about something. Others join the chaos. More rabble-rousing happen...

26 Jun 2017

Business or Brand? What’s more important?You're a start-up! You have a great idea, some willing partners and (fortunately) adequate funding. Now on to business.As business trickles in and you grow (maybe slowly) and as the demands in your business grow and you are burning the candle at both ends you realise that if you do that much extra - you will do that much more business. And...

23 Jun 2017

A 'Novak' moment Summer 2014.  Roland Garros. French Open witness what is now famously called a 'Novak' moment!The tennis match was held up because of rain.As Novak Djokovic parked himself on the bench to take a breather, the ever alert ball boy stepped forward and, in attention, held the large green umbrella above the tennis star’s head.Djokovic turned around and called him forwar...

22 Jun 2017

  Jeremy Bullmore once said: "People build brands as birds build nests, from scraps and straws we chance upon." This quote by Jeremy Bullmore was never truer than today. Indeed with media more fragmented than ever before and attention spans reducing to nanoseconds, it's even a wonder there exists something called brand loyalty.Truly, scraps and straws are lining brand nests th...

26 May 2017

Book Review: Unlock the Real Power of Ideation R. Sridhar's book, Unlock the Real Power of Ideation, was launched yesterday (25th May 2017) with an engaging panel discussion, a brilliant ‘book-cake’ cutting and a ‘fam-jam’ of the Ogilvy family and some doyens of the industry. When I moved out of the advertising industry to the IT industry a lot of my colleagues in the new place would l...

05 Apr 2017

When we (my colleague and I) walk into the room, the atmosphere is uncomfortable. Or rather it’s a ‘forced’ comfortable: being professional because you must.A team of about 25 people are part of the workshop that two of us will be facilitating. Nothing new about it, except that this is a team that has never worked together before. It’s a team that comes from two countries. And it’s a...

09 Feb 2017

The world is flat. Global. Borderless. All of us know this and acknowledge it. To top that, smart organisations have found that putting a global team together means you can manage economies as well as efficiencies of scale. You can pick an expert from anywhere in the world and get that expert to work with another expert team anywhere else. Remotely. Online. On the phone, mail, Skype and ...

18 Jan 2017

If you had told me a year ago, say, in Jan 2016, that I would be running a business I would have laughed it off. But come mid-2016 I took a break from my job at Bloomberg L.P. and Abacus Yellow came into existence 3 months later!I was a good athlete at school and remained an avid fitness enthusiast. But over the years, with work and career taking priority, I had not committed myself to...

09 Jan 2017

Is your organization suffering from Dwarfism?

Maybe you are not sure what I am talking about.

I grew up in Ogilvy. My alma mater. My temple of learning. My childhood, adulthood and mature years were spent there. And David Ogilvy’s Magic Lanterns (for those who know) were my text books. His quotes my mantra.