Saatchi & Saatchi India, part of Publicis Groupe India, has appointed Mayuresh Dubhashi as Chief Creative Officer. Based in Mumbai, he will report to Paritosh Srivastava, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi India, BBH India and Propagate India.
Dubhashi will work alongside Kartik Smetacek, who is also Chief Creative Officer at Saatchi & Saatchi India, on the agency’s creative ambition and what the network describes as modern, culture-led brand solutions.
Who he is
Dubhashi arrives with more than two decades in the business, spanning brand building, innovation strategy and storytelling. He joins from FCB Neo India, where he was Chief Creative Officer, and has previously held leadership roles at Leo India, Grey, Taproot Dentsu and JWT.
The move is a return to Publicis Groupe India. During his earlier stint at Leo, he led Oreo’s #BringBack2011, which the agency notes became India’s most awarded campaign of 2023. His work has picked up recognition at Cannes Lions, D&AD, Spikes Asia, Effie India, APAC Effie Awards, The One Show and The One Show Asia, for brands including Oreo, KFC, Adidas, Uber and Amazon.
Malkani moves to advisory
As part of the reshuffle, Rohit Malkani, Chief Creative Officer at Saatchi & Saatchi India, transitions into a Senior Creative Advisor role, where he will continue to support the creative mandate on select key brands.
Malkani has spent close to a decade at the agency, leading the creative mandate across its Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata offices while building client relationships, adding brand partnerships and developing talent.
What the leadership said
Srivastava said modern creativity is increasingly about understanding culture, consumers and technology to build ideas that deliver business impact, and described Dubhashi as bringing “exactly this combination” along with a proven ability to build brands. He added that Smetacek and Dubhashi will jointly lead the agency’s entire client portfolio, and thanked Malkani for his contribution over nearly a decade.
Rajdeepak Das, Chief Creative Officer, Publicis Groupe South Asia and Chairman, Leo South Asia, welcomed Dubhashi back to the group, pointing to his track record of building creative cultures from their time together at Leo India.
Dubhashi, for his part, said the most powerful creativity will be informed by culture, data and technology while staying rooted in human insight, and pointed to Publicis Groupe’s data and tech capabilities as the platform to deliver that.
Why it matters
Creative leadership churn is one of the clearest signals of where a network thinks growth is coming from. Three things stand out in this appointment for marketers and agency watchers:
- Dual-CCO structure: Saatchi & Saatchi India is running two Chief Creative Officers across one portfolio rather than splitting brands by leader. That points to a bet on breadth of capability per account, not territory.
- Culture-led briefs are the currency: Both the CEO and the incoming CCO framed the mandate around culture, consumers and technology. Award-winning cultural nostalgia plays like #BringBack2011 are increasingly what wins pitches in India.
- Group mobility: A boomerang hire back into Publicis Groupe underlines how the top creative talent pool in India moves within a small circle of holding companies.
What to do about it
If you are a marketer on the Saatchi roster or evaluating a pitch, this is a natural moment to revisit the creative brief and ask how the dual-CCO setup will show up on your business day to day. If you are an agency leader, the structure is worth studying: pairing complementary creative chiefs across a full portfolio, with an outgoing CCO retained in an advisory capacity, is a lower-friction way to refresh creative leadership without disrupting client continuity.
For students and young creatives, Dubhashi’s CV is a useful map of the modern route to a CCO chair — multiple networks, a mix of mainline and integrated shops, and one breakout campaign that travels on the awards circuit.
Source: MediaNews4U
