MullenLowe Lintas’ PointNineLintas announces leadership team

PointNineLintas, the newest independent agency from the MullenLowe Lintas Group, has announced the first set of names in its leadership team. It’s a line-up of senior domain experts that will work with CEO Vikas Mehta. All teams of PointNineLintas will be co-located in offices in Mumbai, New Delhi (NCR) and Bangalore. 

Ameer Ismail has been named Chief Growth Officer, Sumanta Ganguly takes on the role of National Director – Digital Marketing & Transformation, while Sriharsh Grandhe will be National Director – Consumer Engagement. Along with Vikas Mehta; Ameer Ismail, Sumanta Ganguly and Sriharsh Grandhe will work with clients to build bespoke agency solutions geared to maximise return-on-marketing-investments. 

Commenting on the line-up, 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 PointNineLintas.”

As Chief Growth Officer, Ameer Ismail’s mandate will be to work with clients towards creating growth strategies and build full-service agency teams. Commenting on his vision and role for PointNineLintas, Ismail said, “I believe a truly omni-channel agency is imperative for today’s market. We will be amongst very few agencies that kickstart 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 PointNineLintas works with some of the best brands and develops into one of the most significant agencies in the country.” 

The consumer engagement practice for PointNineLintas; including activation, experiential & shopper marketing; will be led by Sriharsh Grandhe. His mandate will be to author go-to-market programs built around physical and digital consumer-journeys. Grandhe will also be involved in developing the agency’s product –stack of mar-tech offerings. 

Commenting on the role and responsibility at PointNineLintas, 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 per cent. We have worked closely with a few of our longstanding clients to experiment and continually improve on engagement KPIs. At PointNineLintas, the goal would be to take these models to even more touch-points to create greater business impact.” 

The digital practice for PointNineLintas will be led by Sumanta Ganguly. His mandate is to place platforms, technology, devices and ecosystems at the heart of marketing programmes in the early stages of brand development. Speaking of his role, Ganguly said, “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 PointNineLintas.”

Ismail, Grandhe and Ganguly will retain their divisional responsibilities for GolinOpinion, LinEngage and LinTeractive, respectively. Explaining the rationale behind this choice, Vikas Mehta added, “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 will be announced in the coming days. 

PointNineLintas is the newest full-service agency of MullenLowe Lintas Group in India. Born in August 2017, PointNineLintas is an omni-channel agency built for consumers in an experience economy. With a team of ~200 practitioners and a portfolio of over 50 clients, the agency offers a robust suite of marketing capabilities including advertising (on and offline), digital marketing & transformation, activation, experiential & shopper marketing, social media, PR and reputation-management – all under one roof. The name PointNine signifies the agency’s philosophy and its operating model of ‘forever beta, by choice’. 

Erstwhile Marketing Services offerings of the MullenLowe Lintas Group – GolinOpinion, LinTeractive and LinEngage – now operate as divisions of PointNineLintas.

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