Pappu can dance, saala

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: Prasannakumar Bhavsar, 28,

business group head, strategic planning, Mediacom

Work Experience:

6 years

Brands worked on:

P&G, Reckitt Benckiser, Deutsche Bank, Garnier, L’Oreal

•Bagged the Ad Club’s Young Achiever Award for Brand Marketing for Gillette Mach 3

He’s one of the rising stars in the media domain, and Prasannakumar Bhavsar, an alumnus of the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA) is enjoying every moment of it. “I believe in setting the agenda for myself,” he says. It is this determination that has pushed Bhavsar through the years as a media professional.

He has worked in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the offer to take up the assignment ironically came on the seventh day after joining Mediacom in 2005 from Zenith Optimedia, where he worked for a year-and-a-half. “I took it up,” he says. Bhavsar wasn’t and the experience there he cherishes to this day.

In Sri Lanka, he handled the P&G business - something he continues to look after even now as business group head, strategic planning. “I have a team of about four to five people reporting in to me,” he says. “All of them are senior managers and planners,” he adds.

Peers and colleagues describe Bhavsar as being meticulous. How meticulous he is can be gauged from the much- decorated Gillette Mach 3 marketing campaign, which gave India its first Gold Lion in the media category at Cannes this year apart from bagging a Silver Lion in the FMCG category at the same festival. “The brief,” says Bhavsar, “was to improve the market share of the product which was stagnant for the last few years.”

Bhavsar’s answer to this was the Shave or Not to Shave campaign where print, TV and the web were leveraged to increase awareness about the product via celebrity discussions, hot spots, vox pops etc. “A microsite was created to encourage people to come forward and vote whether one should shave or not. The interesting bit about the entire exercise was that the brand was woven into the content created.”

The results were that in a span of six weeks volume share increased from 6.3% to 8.7%, awareness doubled and trials went up by a whopping 400%.

Siddhi Yadav, 24,

creative solutions - art,

McCann-Erickson India

Work experience:

4 years

Brands worked on:

Radio Mirchi, Western Union, Saffola, Gems & Jewellery Council of India