Bosco Zarceno, Global Vice President - Laundry Brand Franchise Leader at Procter & Gamble
To whom it may interest,
This is to endorse Mithun as a Creative Director with great potential to take further responsibilities.
I have known Mithun for almost 3 years, since I took the role of Associate Director for Laundry Asia at P&G and he was our Ariel Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi. I consider Mithun one of the best creative partners I’ve had in my career, with a great balance of strategic understanding, creative talent, and eagerness to sharpen/improve the work from his team.
During these years, Mithun has had a major impact on our business, moving Ariel in South East Asia from a brand with declining equity and share to a case study of equity building, sales growth, and gaining penetration across markets. Ariel Philippines and Vietnam are the second and third fastest-growing Tier 1 business for P&G globally, in both cases beyond +20% CAGR. Mithun’s work has been critical for this success: growth acceleration started with the new “Big Spectacle/Behind every success” campaign and has been built over time through a consistent while refreshing way of bringing the brand’s core equity and campaign idea to life.
What sets Mithun apart from many other creative directors is a greater understanding of the essence and vision for the brand, which allows him to create work that builds a stronger story over time, with the appropriate balance of strong insights and emotional engagement and hard-hitting stories with a clear role for our brand. These are the three factors why I see further potential for Mithun:
i) Integrated creative thinking across media and time: Mithun was part of the team that set clear idea and boundaries for what Ariel would stand for (“Superior cleaning” and “enabling women to progress”), within this framework he has built a strong story leveraging each medium to maximize its impact. The best example was “Ariel 1 wash Finally”, where from an insight of the expected experience of the new users of Ariel, created a massive launch fully integrated, gaining disruptive TV awareness, major digital praise, becoming one of the Top 10 annual Youtube videos in the Philippines and global Twitter trending topic for a week. Moreover, he thought about how the consumer experience would evolve and brought a few months later, “Behind every success – 1 wash unfair conditions”, developing a new edge to our campaign that brought higher emotional tension while showing a torture condition for our product. All this derived in the highest share and penetration for Ariel in 5Y!
ii) Great ability to leverage his team’s capabilities/talents: Over the last years he’s gone through several rounds of re-staffing within his team, however, he has always managed to leverage the strength of each new member so that the quality of the creative work never went down. In fact, he leveraged these new members to push new directions within the framework, sometimes successfully or sometimes too edgy to gain full support but always strategically correct and creatively smart.
iii) Strong relationship with the brand team which enables deeper strategic discussions for the brand and leads to sharper creative work: Mithun has created an environment of mutual trust, which allows him to have very open conversations about work, take fast feedback to sharpen work or, often, present ideas acknowledging they may be less likely to progress but that inspire the team for future work. An example of the latter is his work on “Thank you mom”, an evolution of “rise women” for Mother’s day, which he came up with a few weeks before the launch date and he turned into a great piece of work gaining great traction in Vietnam.
I hope we keep enjoying the partnership with Mithun, I would be happy to see him progressing further, getting greater responsibility as I believe he could deliver the same quality of work operating with a broader scope, with a larger team, and having the opportunity to delegate more to them.
Should you need further information please do not hesitate to contact me at zarceno.b@pg.com.
Best regards,
Bosco
Prashant Lal, Regional Marketing Director, Pediatric Nutrition, Pacific Asia, Abbott
Rahul Bibhuti, Associate Marketing Director, Pediatric Nutrition, Pacific Asia, Abbott
Mithun is one of the BEST Creative Directors that we have worked with across the agencies. He brings thought leadership, creativity as well as passion into the business. He gets into detail and has in-depth knowledge of our business and the competitive set. Despite his seniority and years of experience, he is always open to new challenges as well as ideas from different sources, which gets reflected in his depth and breadth of work.
He has incredibly led the SIMILAC and PEDIASURE challenge with resilience and passion in a tough category. And brought a wide variety of new thoughts and strong creativity ( embedded in planning) to our work. This has resulted in both the Similac and Pediasure work achieving unprecedented results in their category ( BEST EVER LINK SCORE EVER IN ABBOTT NUTRITION, GLOBALLY, ACROSS ALL BRANDS). His work has been appreciated globally. He is a true asset to LB and to our business.
Mithun is passionate, amiable, and leads from the front. He has amazing persuasive and leadership skills which are reflected in the respect he commands across his team, brands, leadership levels, and geographies across Abbott, for his strong work ethics, positivity, and a wide array of work that he brings to the business.
He is one of the fundamental forces behind driving a strong relationship between Abbott and LB.
And we wish him great success in the years to come.
Shilpa Krishnan, Product & Commercial Innovation Director, Pediatric & Adult Nutrition, Abbott
I had the privilege of working with Mithun on the adult nutrition brand Ensure for over 3 years. Mithun was instrumental in the brand restage communications campaign across our Pacific Asia markets in 2018 and thereafter, led the leverage campaigns every year, which has led to more than $300MM growth on the brand in the region. His campaigns have delivered some of the highest Digital and TV qualification scores and in market equity scores in the region across brands. Mithun always brings a consumer-centric lens and keen strategic thinking to everything that he touches, but more than anything else, I really appreciate his open attitude to any challenge. I have never known Mithun to say “no”, no matter how stretched a deliverable might be in terms of objectives or timelines, and he has delivered every single time. Mithun is an incredible agency partner and truly an asset to his clients.
Dr Vishal Kaushik. Area Marketing Manager, GLUCERNA & TN, Adult & Medical Nutrition, Abbott
Mithun is an exceptional creative expert who has the ability to understand complex business problems and work with clients to execute a creative solve for the same. I have worked with Mithun on a number of projects and the campaigns created with him helped build the brand. His strategic thinking and breadth of experience working across multiple brands ensured that campaigns created helped the brand with seamless adaption across multiple countries within Asia Pacific. He is an asset and the way he leads and pushes his creative team to bring the best output is exemplary. I wish him the best always.
Joy (Esteban) Ong, Regional Senior Marketing Manager, Pacific Asia
Technically, I was his client. But in reality, he is a treasured partner. Mithun is deeply invested in the brands and has been known to go above and beyond the call of duty. His passion is truly unparalleled. He wears many different hats - but always so creative and strategic. He has contributed greatly to the success of our brands in the region