Dominic Braganza

Dominic Braganza

Creative Director at Dentsu Webchutney
Gurgaon, India, India

About me

Boy, have I seen more than my fair share of blessings.

My advertising journey started in 2003 with stints in Client Servicing, Account Planning and Copywriting, in that order. I was trained into the advertising way by 2 of India's finest advertising craftsmen Zarvan Patel and Prashant Godbole, and saw my way to picking up a slew of ABBYs (the award at India's top ad festival Goafest) every year between 2012-2017. Had the Ad Club Bombay not discontinued the award that year, I would've been Copywriter of the Year 2013.

My most recent misadventures involve attempting to start an ad agency without so much as a rupee in the bank. I deposited my intellectual capital at a then unknown agency in Gurgaon who were looking to rebrand, and rechristened them Foolish. We launched on April Fool's Day 2016 with a recruitment campaign trolling the who's who of Adland. The campaign went viral, and to add insult to injury (or should it be the other way around?) went on to win metal for Copywriting the following year, and I was picked to judge the Creative ABBYs.

Sector Experience

Positions

Creative Director
Bengaluru, India
September 2017 - Present (6 years 6 months)
Creative Director
ITSA Brand Innovations
India
February 2017 - September 2017 (7 months)
With HCL Technologies being a key client, I enjoyed the rare privilege of actually working hands on with the Industrial Internet of Things in a B2B sense on a daily basis. It's not something I could've pulled off on my own, and I thank God for helping me upskill, retrain and not lose my mind, all at the same time.
Creative Director, Co-Founder
Foolish
India
February 2016 - 2017 (11 months)
Provided the intellectual capital to Foolish, the now-failed startup incubated under Adept Media Pvt Ltd. It was a 3-legged race right from the start, with Adept providing the financial and administrative support, and our 5-man team the half pound of crazy. With Adept's backing, we were able to win the biggest pitch of our lives (Invest India).

12 months in, the race is over.

We ran, and we lost. But we ran.

Immensely grateful to the ownership at Adept for letting us do this.
Senior Manager, Marketing
DelphianLogic Technologies
India
December 2013 - February 2015 (1 year 2 months)
How many ex-advertising creatives can boast of being embedded this deep inside a tech company, with a ringside view of global supply chains, leadership development, change management, and the like?

Learning being the lifeblood of every organization—and ours being a learning solutions provider—I got a rare peek into the inner workings of Global Fortune 500s like Allianz, Bayer, Conoco-Phillips, Deutsche Bank, F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Wal-Mart and Zurich Financial.

Being an ad man, this was my closest experience with organizational challenges this far upstream. I soon came face to face with the complex nature of the modern corporate enterprise, and, prompted by the writings of W Edwards Deming and Peter Senge, grew a tendency towards systems thinking.

Thanks to this experience, I now see advertising and marketing as part of a broader system of give and take between business and consumer.
Copywriter
Mumbai, India
February 2013 - December 2013 (10 months)
This was my second stint at ideas@work, the year I won more Goafest ABBY awards than any other Indian copywriter, including the prestigious Gold under the Film category, one of only 5 given that year. Our collective efforts saw us reach our highest ever creative ranking of #4 in India, a feat that seemed virtually impossible, given our size (we were just 7 creatives, and 3 servicing.) The Gunn Report 2015 ranked us as the #5 agency in India, a notch above everybody's darling Taproot Dentsu (take that, Aggie), thanks only to our stellar record over the past couple of years in the Film category, for which much credit goes to Ayappa and Footcandles Films.
Creative Director
Gurgaon, India
August 2012 - January 2013 (5 months)
It might look fancy on your CV at 27, but that's about it. It took me 6 months to realize that big agencies have long since lost their mojo. (Sure, that's where the big money is, but is that everything?)
Copywriter
Mumbai, India
June 2011 - August 2012 (1 year 2 months)
I had the rare privilege of being trained by two of India’s finest advertising practitioners and craftsmen (Zarvan Patel and Prashant Godbole, who were in their day trained by Mohammed Khan and Kersey Katrak at Lintas and later Enterprise), and the pleasure of writing campaigns for the likes of RedBull, Reid & Taylor, Gelusil, Bigrock and Rustomjee and helping launch the Groupon brand in India.
Account Planner
shop (Freddy Birdy & Naved Akhtar)
India
January 2010 - May 2011 (1 year 4 months)
I helped walk the Lava Mobiles brand through its early growth stage by combining market research, brand tracking and strategic planning to influence better advertising outcomes. During this time, I published an exclusive bi-monthly newsletter collating the mobile phone industry’s top news, views, product launches, celeb endorsements, and advertising, something the promoters at Lava came to depend on, in time.
Account Executive
Ad Agencies in Pune
India
October 2003 - May 2008 (4 years 7 months)
I entered advertising at the age of 18 in a client servicing role, while completing my graduation on the side. I always knew I wanted to make ads, and that to seriously make them, I would need to move to Mumbai. By the time I graduated I'd worked with clients in real estate, hospitality, apparel, jewellery, education and auto, the latter of which turned out to be my biggest and most rewarding experience, as account manager on the Maruti Suzuki account in charge of print, radio, PR and events for Maruti's Maharashtra & Goa regions, a role that took some serious operations, people management and media planning skills. This early exposure to Pune's advertising landscape gave me a good, close look at what ails small businesses in India, valuable experience that holds good to this day.
Creative Team
Mumbai, India

Education

Post-Graduate Diploma in Advertising and Marketing

2008 - 2009 (1 year)

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