EducationVCU Brandcenter | Creative Brand Management (CBM) Master of Science | May ‘09 | GPA 3.47

VCU Brandcenter, considered the nation’s #1 AdSchool (AdAge Creativity magazine) and one of the top 60 design schools worldwide (Businessweek) offers the CBM graduate program that marries the rigor of business school marketing education with the creative pursuit of design schools, and cross-functional collaborative styles of modern marketing agencies.

Projects

Online Realty: Bloomkey.comBloomkey.com was trapped in the commoditized segment of Flat Fee MLS in the For Sale By Owner market. After thorough data analysis, competency analysis, competitive analysis, and customer research formulated a brand position akin to ‘Realtor on Call’ that better exploited the company’s core competency.

Read to Them “One School One Book” Reading ProgramPrincipals had closed their ears to 9 million reading programs. Inspection revealed the brand truth that One School One Book was a local community development movement and not just a reading program. Web strategy refocused fund raising from huge corporations to individuals.

+ Google & Peace One Day, Jane Goodall Institute, Muhammad Ali Center, X-Games, Toys R’ Us, Hamilton Beach

Mumbai University | Bachelor of Mass Media | Advertising major | 2005 | GPA: 3.7

Work Experience

PassionForCinema.com | Freelance | Sep 09 – presentSocial Media Strategist (Intern)

• Engage Web site's communities on Twitter and Facebook.• Track social media traffic.• Research and report using Google Analytics.• Develop advertising sales opportunities.

Tata Interactive Systems | Mumbai, India | May–Dec 2006Branding Content Developer

• Created marketing content for software products and services such as management simulations and enterprise application platform for global markets including US, UK, Australia, and India.

• Volunteered with web development skills and learned CSS, web Accessibility design, and search engine optimization (SEO) to help rebuild corporate website that resulted in a 50% rise in traffic

Cogito Media | Mumbai, India | July 05 – March 2006Assistant Director

• Multitasked as a quiz researcher, proofreader, and a production assistant to cinematography and editing crews on a daily TV quiz show broadcast live to over 10 million viewers

PassionsLearning web technology (self taught html, css), blogging, cinema (made two short films), cooking.

Sriram Venkitachalam a Brand Strategist

enjoys a man-on-the-street interview as much as querying a MS Access relational database

804.501.8427 www.SriramVenkit.com SriramVenkit@gmail.com www.twitter.com/SriramVenkit

New York City

We wanted to promote MLB in India

Why?

Because MLB’s international ambitions are audacious. MLB has been helping baseball organizations in India since the 1980’s.

In 2008 MLB talent scouts carried out a hunt for pitching talent through a reality TV show in India and signed two javelin throwers for training in the US.

India is bursting with curiosity for experiences of the rest of the world. The market for world sports in India is growing in leaps and bounds.

People fall in love with a sport over the course of centuries. The origins of baseball in Japan and Latin America, the next best home of baseball outside the US, date back to the late 19th Century.

In that case, how could we promote baseball in a culture that defines itself by its love for baseball’s sibling, cricket?

INDIAVISION

Every once in a while an infatuation will transcend the scope of its meaning and bloom into a passionate pursuit for the unattainable.

A single response to a flirtatious gesture is all it takes to arrest two into an eternal conversation. Attraction transports one to the surface, then surface fades to reveal another, and yet another, luring one in.

Baseball looks at adolescent India from the corner of its eyes. Content with its inheritance, cricket, India has always dismissed this infatuation till recent times.

Baseball is seductive because it is American like Coca Cola and Pizza Hut. They are all glossy and slick, big and provocative. Baseball is fashionable with its shiny metallic bats, extravagant with leather gloves in every fielder’s hand, provocative with its franchise names, logos, and outfits.

Looking through its own prism, adolescent India’s infatuation will mature bewitched by an aggressive, straight-talking and unforgiving organism: a game that puts individuals on the spotlight and keeps each on their toes; a game that rewards the opportunist yet unforgiving with its small window of opportunity. Adolescent India will relate with the audacity in the proclaimed intent to hit high in the air, deep in the field or out of the park. They will appreciate the informality in the liberty to throw the bat after the job of hitting is done.

Today baseball is played by a secret few who leverage their skills in cricket to indulge in this infatuation. More will pick up the game to stand out. Younger kids will step up inspired by their older brothers and sisters. At 13 they’ll play on soccer fields with imaginary diamonds sharing one bat amongst 10. By 18 they will arrange night outs to watch the New York Yankees play rivals Red Sox. They’ll watch it in one of their friends’ home or a sports cafe or on their HP Inspiron laptop over the internet. One of them will have a Yankee hat on, another will have a Red Sox t-

shirt. By 2012, ESPNSTAR will have Dilip Kudwalli, who scored India’s first run, with a home-run in the Asian Championships in 1987, at their studious as an expert panelist on the World Series. The same year, Nathan’s would have opened shop in India with paneer hotdog on its menu. By 2020 an Indian will pitch for an MLB franchise. In 25 years baseball will be one of many sports India indulges in. A ten year old would have a cricket bat, a soccer ball, a basketball and a baseball in his room.

Our objective is to offer a flirtatious gesture seeking that first response.

Baseball is a game of HustlersGet to the point: Do or Die — 3 Strikes, No QuarterUnder the Spotlight — On your ToesCelebrate those who see a run where there is none Baseball is a product of a value systemBaseball = America

&INDIAFinding common ground

Acknowledge global spotlight and seek attention at the individual level

T r a n s i t i o n i n g f r o m socialistic abstention to individualistic indulgence

Hungry for diverse cultural experiences of the world

Surging self esteem fueled by economic boom. In turn, inspires ambitions to design destiny

Strategy

Introduce: break the ice with a wider sports-fan-base

Experience: extend a home for interested folk to experience Baseball

Learn: help young players seek mentors

Introduced MLB as Baseball and Baseball as “The Hustlers Game”. We made posters meant to be distributed through sports magazines.

Designed MLB Lounge—a few concept stores in select cities—as a destination where one can experience baseball. The stores would have batting cages, bleachers to watch MLB games on big screens, a restaurant that serves hot dogs, and some equipment and merchandise.

Find a Basepal: A community website where Indian teenagers picking up baseball could seek mentorship or just hang-out with baseball fans from the US who are keyed in to MLB.

Jake Dubs - Copywriter | Aditi Sheorey - Communication Strategist | Husayn Raza - Art Director | Sriram Venkitachalam - Brand Strategist

Creative Brand Management Independent Brand Study:

Bloomkey.com

The MLS is the holy grail of the real estate business: the database home sellers want to list their property on because 80% of sale happens off the MLS. For years real estate agents guarded their 6% commissions by restricting common folks’ access to the database. Then came the renegade agents who listed sellers for a flat fee on the MLS for just $300. Lawrence Bunnell is one such renegade, a visionary in the transition of real estate business to the internet. But then, a Google search for flat fee MLS brings up hundreds of such companies. Bloomkey is selling commodity.

30 charts, tables and concentric circles later, Bloomkey was repositioned from “flat fee MLS vendor” to “convenient realty intelligence online”.

My knowledge of the real estate industry was limited to the cliche, “location, location, location”. I was attracted to the project because it was a web site and internet is my favorite medium. I thought I would come out the other end with search engine optimization and search engine marketing: the only two terms showing an uptrend in indeed.com for 2009. How wrong I was.

Key Insights

Business: Conversion rates are considerably low. In a commoditized market where the product is the bread winner, business needs to make up with the three other Ps, place, promotion, and price. Where home selling and buying is a once in a 5 year event, and typically users only made single orders, higher cost of marketing could not be justified. Hence, investment must be directed towards product development

Consumer: Consumers were looking to save on commission fees, but were not comfortable lacking realty agent’s marketing knowledge.

Competitive Landscape: Technological innovation is being brought about by companies with over $30 million investments. Realty information was being perfected, with Zillow.com, Trulia.com and others but a big gap still existed in the space where high tech met realty intelligence.

Competency: Bloomkey has its roots in founder Lawrence Bunnell’s two decades as a realty agent.

Solutions: A Realty Intelligence Delivery Device was developed that allowed sellers to provide information about

their homes to Bloomkey, online, and enabled Bloomkey to revert back with a customized marketing strategy.

• Since contractual paper work is a constant technical chase for Bloomkey, suggested insourcing SureClose, a technology platform that delivered realty contracts online and allowed streamlined transaction online for all parties involved.

• Immediate steps involved an information architecture that guided users through the steps of the “for sale by owner” concept juxtaposed with relevant products.

Popularizing Bocce BallDeveloped a business model to aid the transition of a lethargic game played whilst sipping wine to an aggressive social game played while chugging beer. Created Bocce Battlegrounds, online and offline, as the stage to settle all arguments, inspired by the insight that public challenges are strong human motivators: be it western duels, arm wrestling or the phenomenon of “getting served”.

I enjoyed this work because: It involved creating a structure where none existed.

The Problem: No one knew the face of Bocce Ball.

The Truth: Bocce Ball, a game played by older Italian Americans had been adopted by their grandchildren. They revolutionized the game by playing open bocce: bocce outside the traditional clay court, on lawns, and beaches. A good example of this revolution is Dominic Bernacchi’s Beach Bocce League.

The Personality: Bocce is now played with beer and not wine. While Bocce has a low skill barrier to enter the game, players in the new leagues were being tested not so much by their accuracy but their mental capacity to deal with competitive “banter”.

The People: It became evident that the ones picking up Bocce were mostly what we traditionally know as the “creative types”, found in the advertising and media industries. One could say, a few hundred were taking to Bocce as if to indifferently declare, “if we played golf, this is how we would do it.”

The Solution:

• Spreadable Strategy:

Open bocce was cool. We just needed a device to give impetus to its growth, inject a viral element. The banter-fueled mental battles reminded us of public duels of the Old West or even of the “You got Served” phenomenon. When challenged in public no one worth his salt likes to back out. We wanted to take the competition from individuals to organizations that larger pools of people connect with. What if a few guys who play Bocce from one advertising agency set a date and place, and challenged its rival in the same city? A small grass roots initiative that slowly builds momentum; we could start with the advertising industry and slowly grow as per the hierarchy of industry coolness.

• Business Plan

Our business plan had two horns:

• We realized that if we could gather pools of people within their professional niches, there are always dependent businesses interested to communicate/network/market/hang out with them. For the advertising industry it could be media and production companies.

• The second part was Bocce Battlegrounds online: a Web site that allowed people to throw down a Bocce battle to their friends or adversaries. They could buy the bocce set right from the web site, choosing from various manufacturers. This helped establish a business platform to benefit bocce ball manufacturers in exchange for the marketing dollars they would be providing for popularizing Bocce.

• The Pilot

The strategy was manifested as a summer bocce tournament for the ad industry. Marketing material for the same follows.

• Blue Sky Ideas

Bocce would be the game one played to settle any trivial argument: that was our brand plan. We thought why not settle some classic arguments over annual Bocce competitions (a bit like Red Bull Flugtag)

Jeffrey Fortune (Communication Strategist) , Kris Kennedy (Copy Writer), Husayn Raza (Art Director), Sriram Venkitachalam

(Brand Strategist)

Read to Them “One

School One Book”

Reading ProgramPrincipals had closed their ears to 9 million reading programs. Inspection revealed the brand truth that One School One Book was a local community development movement and not just a reading program. Web strategy refocused fund raising from huge corporations to individuals.

I enjoyed this work because: I don’t remember being read to as a child. I never enjoyed reading till college. I know the effects, because I experience the world of difference reading brings. This was personal. Besides, I made an animation film for this project.

The Objective: Enroll several schools to participate. Raise funds for a fledgling organization.

The Barrier: Principals didn’t wish to hear about yet another reading program.

Insight: Talking to schools who had tried One School One Book before we realized this was more of a community builder. As a whole school — students, staff, parents, even bus drivers read one

book; the story brought everyone close. It brought the parents and teachers working together.

The Strategy:

• Changed the conversation from “reading program” to “community building initiative”

• Suggested a new brand name “WeBook”: more contemporary, actionable, and involving

• A web site that articulated the organization’s mission in a quick 2 minute animation

• Web site that showed how each party: teachers, parents, principals, corporations had a role in the ambition

• Communication campaign expressing the involvement students and the school enjoy during One School One Book

• Fund raising focussed on individual donations through web site and blog widgets rather than big corporations.

Also, refocussed fund raising from national corporations to local small business.

Team: Alex Aloise, Jessica Barrera, Enrico Gatti, Alex Jeon, Hank Leber, Sriram Venkitachalam