Vikas Mehta joins Lowe Lintas and Partners as Chief Marketing Officer

Vikas Mehta has joined Lowe Lintas and Partners as Chief Marketing Officer. This is a newly created role and is part of the Lowe Lintas and Partners management team. Vikas joined the agency in May 2013 and will report to Joseph George, CEO Lowe Lintas and Partners. Vikas’ appointment follows his success as the Regional Growth Officer, Lowe Asia Pacific, where he helped take Lowe among the top 10 agency networks in Asia leading new business and strategic growth initiatives.

In this key leadership role, Vikas will play a pivotal role on driving group strategy for organic and inorganic growth, strengthening Lowe’s brand equity in the market place among marketers and practitioners and building the company’s innovation funnel of new offerings. In the days ahead, Mehta will interact closely with select clients across geographies and disciplines. Additionally, the role includes working with prospective clients by aggregating group offerings.

Joseph George commented, “Our growth ambition needs to be pursued in conjunction with further enhancing the thought leadership and agency reputation in the market. It is towards delivering on this objective that Vikas joins us.”

Speaking on his appointment Vikas Mehta adds, “The business of advertising agencies is going through a transformation and we believe it will be a significantly different ball game soon. The mandate is to help our business capitalize on these changes. The purpose behind creating the marketing function at Lowe is to drive our corporate strategy at a group level.”

Speaking on the challenges that come with this role Vikas believes, “The hardest bit is to try and explain what a CMO is doing in an ad agency, its a phenomenon I call ‘too many services and too few solutions’. Every discipline in the marketing spectrum today is being sold as a specialist vertical. As a result, a typical client has a specialist partner each for advertising, digital, search, social, CRM, PR, activation and so on. The biggest challenge is to create a solution that drives medium-agnostic brand strategy, and goes on to build a brand-narrative that straddles all areas of consumer engagement.”

Prior to his stint in Singapore, he was Managing Director of Lowe Vietnam, heading the agency’s country operations. Before joining the Lowe network in 2006, he worked with advertising agencies such as Publicis and Leo Burnett.