Mumbai: Mindshare Fulcrum celebrated 20 years of partnership with Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) at the JW Marriott Mumbai Sahar. The night was one to be remembered, as both HUL and Mindshare Fulcrum reminisced their great journey while showcasing some of their campaigns and milestones for HUL brands over the years. Mindshare Fulcrum was the first ever-dedicated media agency on record set up for a client. The partnership between Mindshare Fulcrum and HUL resulted in a lot of successful and innovative campaigns across multiple media platforms over the last two decades.
This wonderful partnership began on July 1st, 1995 paving the way for groundbreaking work and raising the bar of advertising and media in India. Mindshare Fulcrum became a great success story over the years, under the leadership of Suresh Shankar, Ashutosh Srivastava, Vikram Sakhuja, R Gowthaman, Himanshu Shekhar, Ravi Rao, Anupriya Acharya and current Mindshare Fulcrum head Amin Lakhani. This leadership steered an equally motivated team of the best media investment planning masterminds the country has to offer, to create some of the most memorable advertising this market has seen. Mindshare Fulcrum has launched many breakthrough properties that became iconic, such as Close up Antakshari, Wheel Smart Shrimati, Lakmé Fashion Week, Kissanpur to name a few.
The night was extremely special, as it brought together all the past and present Fulcrumites. It was an emotional reunion for the alumni from the Mindshare Fulcrum family who came under a single roof once again to celebrate this momentous occasion. The evening started with Amin Lakhani welcoming the entire Mindshare Fulcrum and HUL family. This was followed by a heartfelt tribute by Ketaki Gupte to Mike Khanna and Anil Bhatia, her fellow co-founders of this dedicated unit. A surprise video message from Sir Martin Sorrell was played for the audience where he reminisced about winning the Hindustan Unilever business back in 1995 and how Team Fulcrum was an innovative idea that created the bedrock of the media agency business in India.
The night progressed with a nostalgic walk-through of the last 20 years, in the form of an interactive chat show. The first segment lay focus on the initial five years of the journey where Ketaki Gupte, Suresh Shankar, CVL Srinivas, Ashutosh Srivastava, Lakshmi Narasimhan, Sandip Tarkas spoke on not just some of their campaigns but also the work behind the scenes elaborating on their first cheque and the playful rivalry between the Mumbai and Bangalore offices.
The second segment with Vikram Sakhuja, Sridhar Ramasubramaniun, Gowthaman R., and Rahul Welde was dedicated to the millennium ten years 2000 – 2010. They recalled some of the memorable campaigns that earned HUL spots in the Limca and Guinness Book of Records. They also looked back with pride, on cracking the Doordarshan deal, which earned Team Fulcrum a 4 on 4 agency rating along with many personal anecdotes.
The evening wrapped up with a keynote address by Sanjiv Mehta, Managing Director and CEO, Hindustan Unilever, inspiring the current teams to go into the next chapter for HUL. Finally Nick Emery, Global CEO, Mindshare closed the evening with his thoughts on the unique partnership between Mindshare Fulcrum and HUL.
It was an evening of nostalgia and pride, an opportunity to relive the good old days and memories.
Mindshare is a global media agency network with billings in excess of US$31.4 billion (source: RECMA). The network consists of more than 7,000 employees, in 116 offices across 86 countries spread throughout North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific.
Each office is dedicated to forging competitive marketing advantage for businesses and their brands based on the values of speed, teamwork and provocation. Mindshare is part of GroupM, which oversees the media investment management sector for WPP, the world’s leading communications services group.
