Assocham, the chamber of commerce and industry, has conferred Dr. Sandeep Goyal, Chairman of Rediffusion with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Marketing and Advertising.
Accepting the honour, he said, “I am both humbled and honoured by this Lifetime Achievement Award. It is industry and peer recognition for 40 years of being in this business. My innings of four decades has been almost equally divided between being an employee and being an entrepreneur.”
Having started his journey at Goodlass Nerolac Paints (then a Tata company), Goyal had entered the world of advertising when he joined HTA where he worked on a slew of brands such as Horlicks, Nestle’s Maggi Sauces.
Post that, he spent a couple of years working at Trikaya Grey before moving onto Mudra’s Interact Vision where he helped launch Symphony air coolers, Moov rubefacent and Meena Bazaar.
But his career really took off when he joined Rediffusion in 1994 and got the opportunity to launch brand Airtel from scratch and helped brand Maruti get started in advertising in the mid 90s.
Since then, both Sunil Bharti Mittal of Airtel and Jagdish Khattar of Maruti along with Diwan Arun Nanda (his then boss at Rediffusion) have had a major influence on his work.
In 1997, he took over as President of Rediffusion and began working on Colgate Palmolive, Citibank, Taj Hotels, BPL, etc. Following this, he became the Group CEO of Zee Telefilms wherein he was running 32 TV channels and beaming the brand’s bouquet to over 100 countries worldwide.
Soon after, in 2003 he turned entrepreneur and brought Dentsu to India and became its JV partner and Chairman for India and the Middle East. Within 3 years of launching in India, the agency had grown to be a 1200 crore operation with three different ad agencies for Toyota, Honda and Maruti Suzuki besides a full-service agency at Dubai.
“I really enjoyed building the agency, brick-by-brick, client-by-client. It wasn’t easy to create a strong national full-service agency in competition against entrenched Western agencies, but God was with me,” he emphasised.
In all these hectic years in media and advertising, he still managed to do a PhD from FMS Delhi and had recently been conferred a DLitt by the Lucknow University.
But alongside his career and education, Goyal managed to pen down 9 books and over 2000 articles and columns in leading newspapers and magazines.
“Lifetime Achievements can only happen when you have family and friends who support you 24×7. Over the years, my one partner in crime was Gullu Sen, whom I first met at HTA and who then worked shoulder to shoulder with me over the next 25 years. I owe him a big one. Thank you, Gullu, for everything. And finally, a big thank you to my life partner and wife, Tanya Goyal who has been my backbone all through my career and is today Co-Chair at Mogaé, our holding company. Thank you, Tan, for being the beacon of my life, both personally and professionally,” he concluded.
