JUDGES

Ajai Jhala has developed  strategy and managed global and regional brands for clients like Unilever, IBM, UPS, and Cadbury’s in various locations like New York, Mumbai, Paris, London and Bangkok. He was Global Communications Director with Lowe Worldwide in London and Planning Director with Ogilvy New York.

Jhala  successfully crafted and led the launch of the famous ‘dirt is good’ campaign in Asia which went on to win many global and local awards for effectiveness and creativity. 

Just over three years ago he set up BBDO in India along with Josy Paul. BBDO’s work built on the mantra of ‘Create Acts Not Ads’ has won recognition locally, regionally and globally.

 Ashok Lalla is an award-winning digital, brand and social media marketing leader with over 18 years of agency and client business experience on leading global and Indian brands that cut across the spectrum from one-cent candies to million dollar hotel stays.

He currently leads Mindshare's Digital business in India and South Asia, across seven offices and a large bouquet of exciting brands. 

Lalla has translated his passion for digital and brands into authoring and curating ‘The Future of Digital for Brands’, which has fast grown into a highly regarded online global community (http://linkd.in/qfXBrj) of over 2,500 digital, marketing and brand experts and enthusiasts from 38 countries.

You can connect with Ashok on Twitter @ashoklalla.

Barney Loehnis joined Ogilvy in February 2010 to lead Ogilvy’s digital offering across Asia Pacific.  

Loehnis started his career developing digital services and eCommerce for one of the UK’s largest retailers. Prior to Ogilvy, Loehnis was network director, Isobar in Asia and was earlier responsible for Warner Bros Digital across EMEA. In 2000, he helped launch Citikey – a pioneering mobile city guide across Europe.  

He is currently the APAC chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association.

In 1993, Loehnis walked 9,000kms across China, and was the first person to retrace Mao’s Long March on foot. He was arrested 50 times in the process.

Benjamin Grubbs is the Executive Director for Interactive Media, Turner Broadcasting System Asia Pacific, Inc. His group is responsible for expanding consumer engagement across all digital channels, making investments in digital products and services, and the commercialization of these digital assets across Turner's kids', animation and entertainment brands.

Prior to joining Turner, Benjamin held positions at eBay and Yahoo! As Marketing Director for eBay, he oversaw marketing and communications for the business in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. At Yahoo!, Benjamin managed new business ventures in Southeast Asia including Yahoo! Broadcast, Yahoo's audio/video webcasting business for consumers and enterprises, and Yahoo! Enterprise Solutions, which involved digital strategy, consulting and development of initiatives for Yahoo's largest global advertisers.

After meandering through life trying to sell anything from Carrier Airconditioners, Newspapers to his soul, Brijesh decided to settle for an indoor job – advertising. 

Chhaya Balachandran Aiyer is the founder-managing director of BC Web Wise (BCWW), one of India’s most admired independent digital agencies that features amongst the top ten agencies in the country. In February last year, her agency won a prestigious recognition from Adobe for `Excellence in Creating Consumer Experiences', and with good reason. User Experience Design is one of the biggest strengths of BCWW.

She started BCWW started as a web-publishing business with the launch of the very successful content-driven portal www.tips4me.com which was about 18 verticals providing advice across human-interest subjects such as beauty, homecare, fitness, car care, personal finance, amongst others.

In the year 2003, Chhaya diversified her initiative to provide digital-services and quickly established a very robust agency model that has today become the company’s mainstay business.

Chhaya has independently spearheaded the growth chart of BCWW ever since she founded it in 2000.  

Carlton D’Silva is the Creative Director at Hungama Digital Media Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. Under his guidance, Hungama has created more that a thousand digital campaigns, many of which have won accolades for the company, such as the PMAA’s Abby’s and The Globes. With 13 years of experience, his expertise in the digital arena is imaginative and inspiring, giving the company a creative edge in the industry.

Prior to Hungama, Carlton headed the Creative Department at Internet Resources Pvt. Limited. He then moved to Hungama is its early days in 1999 and was instrumental in creating the brand it is today. With an agile and dynamic team of visualizers, designers, and copy writers, he has been responsible for creating over 3500 websites and games for domestic and international clients. He is also on the jury of the Abby Awards (Ad Club of Bombay) and the New York Ad festival.

Over the last decade, Hungama has created and executed some award winning campaigns in the digital space. The company has created innovative marketing solutions for over 350 brands including Coca Cola, Nokia, MasterCard, ICICI Bank, Axe, Nike, Bacardi and Cadbury’s.

A multifaceted person with varied interests in music and cinema, he is a true artist at heart. What stands out is his cool demeanor on the outside, coupled with his industrious energy in the inside. 

Grant Hunter is responsible for iris’ creative output across India, China, Singapore, Indonesia and Australia. Now based in Singapore, Hunter was previously the creative director of iris’ London office for four years. 

He has spoken at SXSW 2012 (and 2011) on the topic of Newsjacking and real-time creativity. He is currently writing the Urgent Genius book, which will be published by Thames and Hudson in 2013. He co-created UrgentGenius.com, blogs for Campaign Asia and regularly contributes to a number of other industry titles. 

During his time at iris, Hunter has led the agency's winning response for the London 2012 Olympic mascots and has created award-winning integrated campaigns for iris’ global clients including adidas, Johnnie Walker and Sony Ericsson.

Jason’s focus is to help Omnicom companies and their clients better capitalize on the creative potential for marketing innovation through emerging communications technologies.

Jason currently covers the APIMA region (Asia Pacific, India, Middle East & Africa) as Vice President of Omnicom Digital, a unit charged with leading strategic initiatives across all digital properties at Omnicom. Jason works with all the divisions of Omnicom in the region to continue advance their digital capabilities and profiles. His responsibilities include recruiting top digital talent, training and general evangelism, capability development, and strategic acquisitions.

Prior to his Omnicom role, Jason lead TBWA’s digital efforts in their TBWAChiatDay Los Angeles and TBWAShanghai offices.

 As the group executive creative director of DDB Group Singapore, Joji Jacob runs the one of the country’s largest and most integrated creative departments. Since he took over the creative helm in late 2009, the agency has gone on to become Singapore’s most awarded at every award show worth its name two years in the running. Jacob has made digital an integral part of what the agency does. 

In both 2010 and 2011, DDB won more awards in digitalaward categories than most other ‘digital’ agencies in Singapore. The agency was voted Agency of the Year at both the Creative Circle Awards 2010 and emerged Creative Agency of the Year at Marketing Awards. Jacob was named Singapore’s most influential creative director in 2010. He returned from Cannes 2011 with a gold, three silver and four bronze Lions. Most recently, DDB Group Singapore was named Creative Agency of the Year at the Campaign Awards and Jacob was named South East Asia’s Creative Person of the Year.

Prashanth Challapalli heads Jack in the Box Worldwide, which is the ‘content-for-brands’ arm of Bang Bang Films. Jack in the Box is an eco-system that operates at the intersection of communication, entertainment, media and technology and fuses brand strategy, video production, on-ground activation and digital platforms to create and distribute customized content for brands across multiple screens and platforms.

With 14 years of blue-chip account management experience across Ogilvy, Lowe, Rediffusion, Bates and Publicis, Challapalli has worked on some of the biggest brands in the personal care, financial services, logistics and automotive sectors. He is passionate about building brands and draws his inspiration from everyday life in which he loves watching movies, gaming and painting on glass and fabric.

Satish Ramachandran leads the digital initiatives for Draftfcb+Ulka group India operations. He handles a diverse range of clients from engineering to FMCG in the B2B and B2C space. He is a firm believer that digital marketing will eclipse all other conventional forms of marketing and aims to spread the digital virus across the agency and its clients.

Ramachandran has wide-ranging marketing communication experience having worked in sales, marketing management and advertising with leading multinational organisations like Boots, Abbott, Johnson and Johnson and Reckitt Benckiser. In his spare time Satish teaches interactive marketing in management institutes with a stead mission to develop talent in this field.

Satyajit Sen comes with more than two decades of experience in the media agency business. 

Prior to joining ZenithOptimedia, Satyajit has worked with a number of leading agencies including Oglivy & Mather and Lowe as well media independent units of Group M and MediaCom.

His career clients include Nestle, Reckitt Benkiser,Hyundai, LG, Maruti, Ministry of Tourism, Nokia, GSK, Dabur, Aviva Life Insurance among others.  In addition, he has also been intensely involved with media brands like Living Media, BBC, Discovery, RPG publications, Mail Today - across their launches and audience retention initiatives.

Sen has won an Emvies Gold for media research work for Aviva (2004) and the Effies Bronze for effectiveness of advertising for the Incredible India campaign in 2006. He has also been a recipient of numerous other internal awards.

A student of Physics at St Xaviers College, and later the college of Business Studies, Calcutta University, Satyajit has attended MDP programmes at Insead. He has a passion for fine arts and would like to take up the brush and palette some day.