WPP owned Ogilvy group on Thursday announced the rebranding of Soho Square as 82.5 Communications. The new agency will be India-specific catering to Indian companies, Indian start-ups and entrepreneurs. 82.5 Communications will be headquartered in Mumbai with offices in New Delhi, Bengaluru and Kolkata.
Commenting on the launch, Piyush Pandey, chief creative officer worldwide, executive chairman India, Ogilvy, said, “82.5 will cater to the needs of creative services market. It is an agency that is tailored to help realise the aspirations of emerging Indian companies, entrepreneurs and brands as well as MNCs that are looking to ‘Indianise’ their brands and forge a connect with Indian audiences.”
Sumanto Chattopadhyay, chairman and chief creative officer, 82.5 Communications, said, “our focus will be on finding ingenious, bespoke solutions to the client’s problems. India has a culture of finding interesting and effective solutions to everyday problems—we are, as a nation, very creative. It’s this creative mindset that we hope to inculcate in 82.5. The rationale for our name, incidentally, is that 82.5 is the longitude of Indian Standard Time. As an agency focussed on Indian entrepreneurship and Indian ingenuity, we felt this name would be apt.”
The accounts of Soho Square, another creative agency belonging to the Ogilvy group in India, will now be managed by 82.5 Communications. VS Srikanth, who was the director and CEO of Bates CHI & Partners India, will be the CEO of the new entity, responsible for implementing plans to deepen and widen company’s engagement with its existing clients.
Samrat Bedi, president-West, Chandana Agarwal, president-North, Sharmista Dev, head-Kolkata, Naveen Raman, head-Bengaluru, Siddhartha Roy, EVP planning, Anuraag Khandelwal, ECD, Mayur Verma, ECD, Mukund Sharma, ECD and Ranadeep Dasgupta, group creative director, complete the core team of 82.5 Communications.