Renowned Advertising Thinker joins Ampersand Advisory

Kunal Sinha, a renowned ad industry guru and thinker, has joined leading Malaysian agency Ampersand Advisory as Chief Knowledge Officer.

Sinha has over three decades of experience, two of which were spent living and working in Mumbai and Shanghai. His most recent stint was in M&C Saatchi Indonesia, which gives him a unique perspective over Asia.

Sinha has worked in leading agencies such as JWT, Ogilvy and McCann and data consultancies like Kantar and The Futures Company. He also ran Ogilvy Asia’s consumer and cultural trends program, and sustainability practice Ogilvy Earth.

Sinha led projects involving trend forecasting and predictions on the Future of Technology, India’s top 50 growth markets for Tata Sons, the future of AI for Mastercard, beauty and grooming futures for Google, and identifying generational opportunities for Nissan in India.

He has also delivered branding and consumer solutions for companies such as Unilever, Intel, Diageo, BAT, Mondelez, SC Johnson, VF Corporation (The North Face), International Hotels Group, The Economist, Visa, Arla Foods, Smithfield Foods, Spotify, Truecaller, TikTok, Permata Bank and Mundipharma in key Asian markets.

He has driven market innovation for firms such as Ceat Tyres, Godrej Consumer, Aegon Life, Amazon, The Times Group, and organisations like UNICEF and AmCham.

As a public speaker, he has delivered keynotes at conferences and events across Asia Pacific, North America and Europe. Sinha is a 12-time winner of WPP’s Atticus Awards for original thinking, including 3 Grand Prix, in addition to multiple effectiveness awards.

Apart from training two generations of strategists and researchers, he has spoken at Harvard and Cambridge universities, taught at London Business School, Kellogg School of Management, Kedge Business School, CEIBS and SPJIMR, amongst many others.

Sinha is the author of six books, including four on creativity, culture and business, plus over 150 articles / papers; he is one of WARC’s (World Advertising Research Centre) most prolific contributors with over 40 published works.

Sinha said: “Joining the purposeful and highly successful team at Ampersand Advisory is an exciting proposition. This gives me the opportunity to create a strong positioning for our consulting and analytics proposition. It also provides me a platform to explore a new market and gather more understanding of evolving consumers in Asia.”

Sandeep Joseph, CEO and co-founder of Ampersand Advisory, said: “I’ve been an admirer of Kunal’s work for many years, and he had also asked me to write for WARC when he was consulting them. We have built Ampersand Advisory as one of the fastest growing agencies not just in Malaysia but across Asia Pacific, as evidenced by us featuring in the FT Statista 500 High Growth Companies Asia Pacific for two years in a row.

Furthermore, we have won over 200 awards in the last 7.5 years, for creativity and media effectiveness, including Overall Creative MARKie and Overall Media MARKie 2023 and 2024, as well as Appies Media Agency of the Year 2022 and 2024.

But we are not resting on our laurels. We would like to leverage Kunal’s nous and skills to strengthen our strategic consulting offering, which rides as a layer above our services of Media, Creative, Social, PR and data analytics with AI.

With almost 80 staff, under one P&L, we’ve built an integrated set-up that’s truly seamless. Our existing clients will get first dibs on Kunal, but we’re also looking at expanding our reach and helping more companies. The mission, which I am grateful Kunal chose to accept, remains unchanged and singular: to deliver for our clients as per our motto “business results, now!””