ASSOCHAM honours Dr. Sandeep Goyal with lifetime achievement award

Dr. Sandeep Goyal, Chairman of Rediffusion was over the weekend honoured by ASSOCHAM, the chamber of commerce and industry, with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Marketing & Advertising.

Accepting the honour, Dr. Goyal said, “I am both humbled and honoured by this Lifetime Achievement Award. It is industry and peer recognition for 40 years of being in this business. My innings of four decades has been almost equally divided between being an employee and being an entrepreneur.”

Goyal says he owes his success and professional growth in all these years to all the wonderful companies and brands and fellow professionals that he has been fortunate to work with

Goyal started his journey at Goodlass Nerolac Paints, then a Tata company. He then joined advertising at HTA where he was lucky to have handled Horlicks, then India’s most media heavy brand and launched Maggi Sauces for Nestle. He then spent a couple of years at red hot Trikaya Grey before moving onto Mudra’s Interact Vision where he helped launch Symphony aircoolers, Moov rubefacent and saree retailer Meena Bazaar

But his career really took off when he joined Rediffusion in 1994 and had the opportunity to launch brand Airtel from a scratch. He then helped brand Maruti get started in advertising in the mid 90s. Two of his clients, Sunil Bharti Mittal of Airtel and Jagdish Khattar of Maruti have had a major influence on his work. As has Diwan Arun Nanda, his then boss at Rediffusion

In 1997 Goyal took over as President of Rediffusion and got to work on Colgate Palmolive, Citibank, Taj Hotels, BPL and many more juicy businesses. Rediffusion was then at its pinnacle and Goyal enjoyed leading one of India’s finest agency teams

In 2001 and 2002 Goyal had the privilege of becoming the Group CEO of Zee Telefilms running 32 TV channels and beaming our bouquet to over 100 countries worldwide. It was a superlative experience

In 2003 he turned entrepreneur. He brought Dentsu, the world’s largest agency to India and became its JV partner and Chairman for India and the Middle East. Within 3 years the agency had grown to be a 1200 crore operation with three different ad agencies for Toyota, Honda and Maruti Suzuki besides a full service agency at Dubai. “I really enjoyed building the agency, brick-by-brick, client-by-client. It wasn’t easy to create a strong national full service agency in competition against entrenched Western agencies but God was with me,” emphasises Sandeep Goyal

Goyal also goes onto mention here that while Goddess Lakshmi has been very benevolent over the years, he has also been fortunate to have the benign blessings of Ma Saraswati. In all these hectic years in media and advertising he still managed to do a PhD from FMS Delhi and has recently been conferred a DLitt by the Lucknow University. Also along the way he has written 9 books and over 2000 articles and columns in leading newspapers and magazines. This academic aspect of his life has always brought him immense happiness

“Lifetime Achievements can only happen when you have family and friends who support you 24x7. Over the years, my one partner in crime was Gullu Sen, whom I first met at HTA and who then worked shoulder to shoulder with me over the next 25 years. I owe him a big one. Thank you Gullu for everything

And finally a big thank you to my life partner and wife, Tanya Goyal who has been my backbone all through my career and is today Co-Chair at Mogaé, our holding company. Thank you Tan for being the beacon of my life, both personally and professionally,” Dr. Goyal concludes

Last, just a few learnings from his 40 years in business -

1. If you can dream it you can do it
2. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take
3. You never win silver, you miss gold

Dr. Sandeep Goyal (61) is based out of Mumbai