Laeeq comes with extensive experience in the areas of Branding, Advertising, Marketing & Communications. He co-founded Origami Creative & Bloombox Brand Engineers 17 years back and the group has grown to be a family with multiple interests in the areas of business brand consulting, marketing & advertising, technology and food & beverage. A post graduate in marketing & advertising from St. Josephs Bangalore; Laeeq is a first generation entrepreneur and also has interests & investments into other F&B businesses like Flying Squirrel Artisan Coffee & Brown Apron Online Fresh Cut Speciality Meats and is constantly in the look out to support good innovative ideas. Laeeq also serves as the Chair of CII – Young Indians, Bangalore which is a voluntary industry led, industry managed body. Young Indians (Yi) is an integral part of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) formed with an objective of creating a platform for Young Indian’s to realize the dream of a developed India. It has over 2600 direct members in 40 city chapters, and indirect membership of 8500 through its Yuva Student Program. Vision of Yi is “To become the Voice of Young Indian’s Globally”. When Laeeq is not busy advising clients, he could be caught watching a football match with friends or exploring a new food & beverage joint in the city. A hardcore speed & sports enthusiast, Laeeq is always on the run and loves exploring the unseen.

Passionate about the power of communication, storytelling and digital marketing. Teaching, mentoring start-ups and empowering women is what drives her….

Malavika founded Brand Circle in 2018, a Consultancy Firm working in the areas of Digital Communication, Storytelling, Mentoring Start-ups, Women Entrepreneurs and Corporate Leaders.

In her earlier avatar she founded and ran Saatchi & Saatchi Focus in India for 25 years where she worked on brands like Bosch, Coats, Reliance Polymers, Infosys, Microsoft, Astra Zeneca, Pfizer, Novartis, Mead Johnson, AIS and Novo Nordisk amongst others. She has 36 years of experience in communication and entrepreneurship. Brand Consultancy, Strategic Planning and Training are her focus areas.

After her accountancy training and MBA from the IIM, Bangalore Malavika joined HMT Watches. She then ran her own interior design and packaging firm before joining Saatchi in 1993 after a stint at Mudra Communications. Malavika trained briefly at Saatchi & Saatchi in London, New Zealand and Singapore.

Malavika was one of the first Gurukul Chevening Scholars, selected by the British Government for a special program under Lord Meghnad Desai at the London School of Economics on Globalization. Malavika is the first woman to win the Distinguished Alumni Award from IIM Bangalore.

She is on the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Management, Visakhapatnam, on the Governing Council of Mount Carmel College and on the Advisory Board of the NSRCEL of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. At NSRCEL, she is actively involved in mentoring start-ups in the profit and non-profit sectors. Her current focus is mentoring women executives and entrepreneurs to reach their full potential.

Malavika was President of the IIMB Alumni Association and the Advertising Club Bangalore.

Malavika teaches Marketing and Communication at various post graduate institutes of management and communication in India and abroad. She has been doing this for the last 25 years because she believes that sharing knowledge is the only way to learn.

10 years of work experience in Media

Kishan Kumar M S is Managing Partner, South at Wavemaker, a GroupM company. He is MICA post graduate and communication professional with 14 years of experience in strategic planning, business development, trading, new media and talent management. Kishan is one of the key architects who built Maxus (now Wavemaker) as the biggest media agency in South India over last decade. He is part of the team that has created business impacting work for key clients like Titan Company, Britannia Industries, Tata Global Beverages, Google India, Wipro Consumer Care, AMD, MTR Foods, Arvind Brands, Manappuram Finance, Centuary Mattress & Mathrubhumi group. He is the recipient of 100+ national & international awards including 3 Cannes finalists, 2 Festival of Media Global Golds, 2 WPP Creme De La Creme (biggest award within WPP Network — one winner & one shortlist), Mashable Global finalist, Spikes & Festival of Media Asia Golds, WARC Prize shortlist and many wins across Emvies, Goafest, Big Bang. Under his leadership, Tata Global Beverages won the coveted Grand Emvie & Client of The Year at Emvies for the Power of 49 campaign which went on to set a record of winning 55+ awards nationally/internationally. He is part of Aspire, GroupM’s regional internal training community since 2007 and part of Maxus India Mancom since 2014. Kishan is a keen observer of culture and and its impact on consumer behaviour. He is passionate about Mohanlal, music, Malayalam language, movies across languages & murder mysteries (in that order). He is at the sunset of a 33-year-long gully cricket career (and yet to come to terms with it). He is determined to get back to his first love theatre in 2018 and has even shortlisted a script.

Arunava today is the Chief and Creative Director of ‘BLEU’, a Brand, Design & Communication Boutique he started from scratch. Of course, nothing was easy for this maths graduate who made a giant leap into the bad mad world of advertising 15 years ago. But with his attention to detail and willingness to burn the midnight oil, he learned the ropes one by one. Today, he is the go-to person for young professionals who want to know what is the fuss about ‘digital’ or ‘is print actually dead’.

Tina Garg is the Founder & CEO of Pink Lemonade, a Bangalore-based creative communications agency, and one of the few to bridge the creative and digital divide. Starting off as a creative agency, we have quickly covered web technologies, in-house video production and UI/UX capabilities to give clients what a new world of marketing needs. Clients such as Lenovo, Jockey, Mahindra Aerospace, Capillary Technologies, and many more are a testament to Pink Lemonade’s excellence and Tina’s leadership.

A marketing and brand specialist with extensive experience in the creative industry, Tina’s expertise lies in internal and marketing communication, branding, design, and digital marketing, among others. She has won prestigious awards such as the eMERG Woman Achiever of the Year, 2016 and Best Woman Entrepreneur (Pioneer Club of Christ University, Institute of Management, 2017). Further, in 2016, she was among 13 candidates selected to be part of a Fortune-US State Department sponsored mentorship program, to be mentored by a female mentor from the Fortune 500 companies. She was paired with Airbnb. Tina was also one of 10,000 women worldwide to be coached by Goldman Sachs and ISB, as part of a program which provides women entrepreneurs business and management education.

15 years of work experience in PR & Media.

Sanchayeeta Verma, Senior Vice President, Wavemaker, brings in 24 years of experience across media and marketing. She has played a key role in shaping the go-to-market strategy of many of India’s top brands across a wide spectrum of categories.

She headed the insights division of Mindshare India, being a part of their global team. Within that, she launched the first communication planning framework for GroupM India.

She led the Wavemaker South business expanding it tenfold across clients, operating cities and verticals in the 7 years that she handled it.

Verma has also handled the Wavemaker South Asia mandate with a lot of work being done in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. From 2017 she has been in charge of setting up and running the Wavemaker ITC operations, with multiple teams who work on ITC across Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata.

She is passionate about the development of young talent in the media, marketing and advertising fraternity and was President of Ad Club Bangalore from 2016-2018

Having tenured his Masters in Marketing, specialising in Advertising & Communications in the UK, Nigel is a second generation entrant to the advertising world. As Executive Director at Disha Communications, he has a close personal and professional insight into the multifaceted world of advertising. Nigel was instrumental in setting up Disha’s international wing, DGI (Disha Global Innovations) in Singapore and working with clients like Coca Cola, Carlsberg, Unilever, Japan Tobacco- to name a few. He was also successful in acquiring the Toyota account for Disha for their BTL activities across South India. An enthusiastic photographer and an avid sportsman, he has represented India in the Paintball World Cup, Nigel is either in the gym, or travelling to explore a new destination when not in office.

Sundar is a Sales & Marketing professional with significant industry experience with multi functional expertise in Business Development, Corporate Sales, Product Management, Promotional Strategies and Advertising Functions. As the P/L owner at major companies, experienced in establishing revenue & operating plans and also driving the execution & implementation. As a seasoned Media professional, collaborating and co-creating solutions with advertisers is what keeps him going on a profesional front.

Sundar has worked with various media groups and is currently SVP, Response with Times of India Group. He has held national sales head positions at The Hindu Group and Vijay Karnataka before this and also worked with Midday group(as Publisher and Sales Head) and with Turner International.

RT Kumar, a post- graduate in Advertising and Marketing was twice President of The Advertising Club of Bangalore, former Regional Convener of the Advertising Association of India and immediate Past Chairman of the Governing Council of The Public Relations Council of India. An advertising professional with three decades of experience, RT Kumar is the founder Director of Oysters Advertising Pvt. Ltd., a full fledged advertising agency headquartered in Bangalore.  RT Kumar has  authored a book of short stories, acted and directed short films and acted in few feature films too. When he is not cooking up stories, he loves cooking in the kitchen.

Radhika Ramani, Managing Partner, Motivator, brings in 19 years of across media and marketing. She comes with global, regional and local experience having worked across 30+ international clients in EMEA, America & the APAC regions.

After an initial four year stint in Star,India and Sky, UK, she moved to the OMG Group, UK. Here, as part of the international team, she built a very successful international unit of investment specialists. In 2013 she moved to MediaCom APAC in Singapore with the remit of strengthening the agency’s execution planning, accountability and trading capabilities in the APAC and SEA region. In 2017, she moved to Bangalore to head the Motivator, South.

Travel, long walks and culture fascinate her. A curious & lifelong student, she jumps into any project that gives her the opportunity to learn.