PointNine Lintas, the newest independent agency from the MullenLowe Lintas Group, announced the first set of names in its leadership team. It’s a lineup of senior domain-experts that will work with the CEO, Vikas Mehta. All teams of PointNine Lintas will be co-located in offices in Mumbai, New Delhi (NCR) and Bangalore respectively.
Ameer Ismail has been named Chief Growth Officer, Sumanta Ganguly takes on the role of National Director – Digital Marketing & Transformation and Sriharsh Grandhe would be National Director – Consumer Engagement. Along with Vikas; Ameer, Sumanta and Sriharsh will work with clients to build bespoke agency solutions geared to maximize return-on-marketing-investments.
Speaking of the lineup, Vikas Mehta said: “The biggest challenge in getting an omni-channel model right is the ability to bring multi-disciplinary expertise together upfront. This leadership team is made up of seasoned practitioners. It allows us to bring multiple disciplines to the table right at the start and offer clients, a customised agency team that’s built around their brand opportunities. This is in sharp contrast to the administrative structure most agencies follow for their verticals. We are lucky to have experts like Ameer, Sumanta and Sriharsh within the organisation, to be my co-founders at PointNine Lintas.”
As Chief Growth Officer, Ameer’s mandate would be to work with clients towards creating growth strategies and build full-service agency teams. Commenting on his vision and role for PointNine Lintas, Ameer Ismail commented: “I believe a truly omni-channel agency is imperative for today’s market. We will be amongst very few agencies that kick start with such a deep and diverse capability line-up. To exploit the full potential of our offering, my role as Chief Growth Officer will be to create a dynamic strategy that will ensure PointNine Lintas works with some of the best brands and develops into one of the most significant agencies in the country.”
The consumer engagement practice for PointNine Lintas; including activation, experiential & shopper marketing; would be led by Sriharsh Grandhe. His mandate will be to author go-to-market programs built around physical and digital consumer-journeys. Sriharsh would also be involved in developing the agency’s product –stack of mar-tech offerings.
Commenting on the role and responsibility at PointNine Lintas, Sriharsh Grandhe said: “Over the last two years at LinEngage, a considerable effort has been made on creating effectiveness for our clients and we have successfully demonstrated reach-to-conversion ratios as healthy as 35%. We have worked closely with a few of our longstanding clients to experiment and continually improve on engagement KPI’s. At PointNine Lintas, the goal would be to take these models to even more touch-points to create greater business impact.”
The digital practice for PointNine Lintas would be led by Sumanta Ganguly. His mandate would be to place platforms, technology, devices and ecosystems at the heart of marketing programs in the early stages of brand development. Speaking of his role, Sumanta Ganguly says, “Digital is no longer the purview of communication alone, today it’s leading the discussion of business transformations. We are at the crossroads of design, data and platforms, and will continue to focus on digital transformation stories for a larger set of clients at PointNine Lintas.”
Ameer, Sriharsh and Sumanta will retain their divisional responsibilities for GolinOpinion, LinEngage and LinTeractive respectively. Explaining the rationale behind this choice, Vikas adds, “One of the big reasons why full-service is preached more often than practiced, is because every skill-set comes with its own administrative layers. For example, when you need a PR expert, you also inherit the administrative layer of a PR agency. In a day-to-day working scenario, this becomes a major barrier to collaboration. We’ve made a conscious choice to cast our best minds as both, ‘practitioners’ and ‘managers’ making it easier to collaborate seamlessly.”
The agency is planning more additions to the leadership team, which would be announced in the coming days.