Over the past sixteen years, Abigail Dias, executive vice president – planning, Ogilvy India, has worked with leading ad agencies on some of the country’s most-loved brands across beauty and personal care, food and beverages, media, technology, e-commerce, fashion and lifestyle categories.
Her work has found recognition at prestigious industry awards. The most recent being Dove’s ‘Stop the Beauty Test’ campaign that won a silver lion for creative strategy at Cannes, a gold at the WARC awards for Asian strategy, silver at the APAC Effies and a shortlist for a Glass Lion at Cannes this year.
Dove’s ‘Stop The Beauty Test’ is a campaign and a platform that brings out in the open the issues that gradually diminish and chip away at women’s self-worth. With this campaign, the brand went back in time to when the pressure and conditioning to make them ‘suitable brides’ really begins. For more than 80 percent of Indian women, that happens to be when they’re still school-going teenagers. The campaign was a reflection of real stories that we hope will continue to inspire change and further Dove’s ambition of a world where women can enjoy beauty on their own terms.
Outside of work, she is a weekend baker, amateur woodworker, compulsive doodler, content junkie and lifelong bookworm.
Dias’ colleague Rajneesh Bolia has a passion for fusing cutting-edge technology and imaginative thinking. Bolia is the EVP and head of creative tech and innovation at Ogilvy India. From crafting personalized experiences to enabling industry-first campaigns and coming up with first of a kind ideas, to continuing to push the envelope and help re-shape the landscape of advertising, Bolia has been playing a crucial role in transforming the story of Ogilvy.
His award winning projects include Cadbury’s Celebrations ‘Shahrukh Khan My Ad’ which won Cannes Lions 2023 Grand Prix, Grand Prix at MAD Stars 2022, one Titanium, two Gold, one Silver, one Bronze at Cannes 2022, among other awards. He was also a part of the team that worked on the Coca Cola’s ‘Locked Coke’ campaign which is an interesting merger of tech and humanity.
Karunasagar Sridharan, ECD, Ogilvy India is the other YoungGun from Ogilvy India. Sridharan grew up dividing his time between two things he loved equally – coding and writing. He spent four years in university studying to become a computer scientist and even represented India at International programming contests, but eventually succumbed to the creative bug by joining an ad agency right after graduating.
Over the next 17 years, he worked on brands of every kind, including Cadbury 5 Star, Cadbury Perk, Coca-cola, Puma, Volkswagen, Virgin Mobile, Instagram, and many more. His work has been recognized at award shows like Cannes Lions, One Show and Clio, and has brought home over 60 international awards and nominations, and 100 plus local awards.
Recent campaigns include the “Do Nothing” campaign for Cadbury 5 Star (including, “5 Stars Everywhere”, “Nothingcoin”, “Do Nothing Mode”, “My cousin’s wedding”, “Mush Detector”, “Real legends of Cricket”, “Do Nothing Heroes”), “Perk Disclaimers” for Cadbury Perk, “Locked Coke” for Coca-cola, “Let there be sport” for Puma.
While he still enjoys working with traditional media like TV, his primary focus has been on helping brands find a sweet spot between creativity, technology, PR, entertainment, and pop-culture to create buzzworthy stories than the internet can’t ignore.
About YoungGuns
Storyboard18 is bullish on India’s creative industry and the talent putting it on the map. To kick off our campaign to fuel the industry further, we’ve launched YoungGuns, an initiative to celebrate new ideas, bright talent, fearless creativity and an exciting future. It’s critical to recognize, celebrate, encourage and support young, brave and bold brand makers if we want to propel the industry forward. YoungGuns is an annual recognition program that puts creativity and talent back in the spotlight.
Here’s how we did it
Storyboard18’s YoungGuns is a celebration of talent – future-ready young professionals in advertising and marketing who are driving businesses and brands forward and bringing glory to India globally. YoungGuns – Class of 2023 was put together by our editorial teams through a selection process based on work/campaigns that have won global, Indian and regional awards in the past two years, giving India even greater creative clout the world over and setting a benchmark for the industry.
Read MoreBullish on India’s creative industry: The YoungGuns are coming today