CV.L. Srinivas, CEO (India & Asia Pacific) of Group M-owned media agency Maxus India, has a theory on why he enjoys giving guest lectures at MICA in Ahmedabad and IIM, Bangalore. “I may be in the corporate sector, but teaching is in my blood,” he says. “My father taught aeronautical engineering while my grandfather taught mathematics at Lahore University.”

Srinivas also teaches at Delhi’s FMCC, which offers specialisation in media planning and buying. “It’s interesting to train the younger generation. Besides, there is so much to learn from them, especially technology,” he says. The mild-mannered CEO, who travels 20 days a month, asserts that teaching offers him the much-needed break from work. And students can only benefit from his presence.

For Srinivas is among the country’s best known media specialists. He has worked with Fulcrum and also with Madison Media as its chief operating officer. At Madison, he won the Coca-Cola business in 1999. India was then the only country where Coke had appointed a local media agency. Among the other accounts he won were Maruti, Perfetti and Domino’s.

In 2003, Srinivas joined Maxus. In India, ad conglomerate WPP’s media arm Group M looks after media business worth Rs 2,500 crore. The group operates Fulcrum, Mindshare, Maxus and MEC. Thanks to his efforts, Maxus India, set up to take care of big Indian clients, has grown by 50 per cent over the past one year. He has acquired clients like Hero Honda, Hutch, Britannia, GE and Titan.

“At a conservative estimate, I expect Maxus to grow by 25-30 per cent for the next two years,” says Srinivas, who also takes care of the agency’s business in China, Hong Kong and Indonesia. He is also a member of the executive committee of Group M. “Since media has been redefined, we worry about keeping abreast of the latest. For instance, films, mobile and cricket are also media. Anything can be a medium for advertisers today,” he says.

The ad industry may be hot on him for his media skills, but Srinivas did not start out as a media man. Instead, he put his mechanical engineering degree (from BITS, Pilani) to use and joined the TVS Group in Bangalore. “TVS operated a computer peripherals business and I was in charge of production and planning,” he recalls. Clearly, it wasn’t his cup of tea. Three years later, he was back at school at XLRI, Jamshedpur, to study management.

But how did he land in advertising? XLRI sent him to ad agency Lintas in Bangalore to do his summer job. “I have lived in Bangalore all my life and was only too happy to go back home during the holidays.” It did not turn out to be much of a holiday though. For Srinivas was assigned the tough job of crunching and analysing research data and making sense of the effectiveness of advertising for Hindustan Lever’s tea brands ? Brooke Bond and Lipton. It was my first exposure to media, says Srinivas who remembers making a presentation to HLL at the end of two months. Impressed, Lintas branch head Fali Vakil offered him a job. However, in 1994, both Srinivas and the Lever’s tea business moved to HTA.

Within a year, Srinivas was restless. “I was not happy. For an advertising agency, media was only a backroom function those days. I hated being a backroom boy,” he says. Luckily for him, HTA decided to float Fulcrum, a separate media division to take care of the buying and planning needs of HLL’s brands. Srinivas volunteered to join and, along with a handful of others, set up Fulcrum. “It was a great experience,” he says.

Over the years, the explosion in terms of the number of TV channels, print options and new media like the Internet has brought the media function in an advertising agency to the forefront. Today, every agency has a separate division specialising in media.

However, the boom also poses a big challenge to the ad industry, that of acquiring and retaining talent. “We face competition not just from other media agencies, but also from TV channels, print, radio and other entertainment companies,” says Srinivas. Not surprisingly, he advocates setting up more advertising institutes to train people with specialisation in media. And his guest faculty role proves that he practises what he preaches.

As told to Shuchi Bansal

in New Delhi