BS People: Karthik Lakshminarayan

Pappu pass ho gaya's brain is new COO of Crest

Pappu pass hogaya, kuch meetha hojaye....! For Karthik Lakshminarayan, this tagline is destiny’s real sweetness on him.

Lakshminarayan—a computer software programmer who became an accidental media man—considers one of the mobile campaigns by Madison Media with this line in it good enough to win the prestigious Cannes Media Lions award as the memorable moment of his career.

It was in 2006, that Madison had undertaken this campaign for Reliance Mobile and Cadbury Dairy Milk, offering students who had appeared for 10th and 12th standard exams their results on mobile phones. All that the student had to do was to SMS the exam number and he or she would get their marks. If the student was passed, it was followed by the tagline message, Pappu pass ho gaya, kuch meetha ho jaye, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. The campaign made Madison Media the first Indian media agency to bring home the prestigious Cannes award.

Perhaps this success at Cannes is what brought him back to Madison Media again as he was roped in by the firm recently to become the chief operating officer (COO) of Crest, a business unit under Platinum Media, to handle the ITC business.

When he got a campus placement in 1995 at Dalal Street journal, Lakshminarayan only dreamt about a software programmer’s job with a management touch. He then shifted to advertisement sales, a few months later again to Stratagem Media as a media planner and then to Chaitra Leo Burnett as media manager.

However, it was his eight-year stint at Madison Media Communications as associate media director and later as COO of Madison Media Infinity (MMI) (starting from 2000), which transformed Lakshminarayan into a complete media man. Meanwhile, destiny had something more in stock for him as he became part of the team that launched Colors where he was head of business planning and strategy for the channel.

After the Colors episode, Lakshminarayan joined Turmeric Vision as the COO of its new TV channel FoodFood boosting his production career further. In November this year, coming back to Madison Media was a cycle complete for Lakshminarayan. “I am a Madison person first since I spent better part of the last decade here,” he says.

In the 16-year-old career, he is credited with handling firms like Godrej, Cadbury, Marico, McDonalds, Asian Paints and Bharti AXA Insurance. And what of his plans for ITC? Lakshminarayan says, “Personally, I want to bring to the table at ITC, what I did for other companies like Godrej and Cadbury, shuttling between Bangalore and Kolkata.”