Saints & Warriors appoints Akhil Saxena as executive creative director

He has over 23 years of experience in advertising.

Saints & Warriors has recently appointed Akhil Saxena as executive creative director. In his new role, Saxena will report to Pushpinder Singh, chairman, Saints and Warriors, and will be a part of Sartaj Jaffri's Mumbai team. Jaffri is senior vice-president and branch head, Mumbai, Saints & Warriors.

Saxena has over 23 years of experience in advertising and has worked on several national, as well as international brands. He started his career in 1989 as a consultant copywriter at Lintas India (now, Lowe). In 1991, he moved on to become a senior copywriter at Ogilvy India.

He joined Everest Advertising in 1992, to become copy group head. After working there for a period of over two years, he went on to join Madison Advertising as an associate creative director. After a brief stint with Madison Advertising, he moved to Triton, where he spent over three-and-half years as associate creative director. He decided to head back to Everest Advertising, but this time as an associate creative director.

After spending two years at Everest, he joined Interact Vision Advertising & Marketing.

In August 2004, Saxena joined Percept/H as creative director, and spent over six years in the organisation, working on projects such as SBI Mutual Fund and India First. He left Percept/H in 2010.

Before taking on the new role at Saints & Warriors, Saxena was creative director consultant for AMO and he managed this role, along with doing freelance work for several agencies. He has also worked as a lyricist and has worded the title tracks of several Hindi daily soaps. He feels that the language Hindi, is his true strength and he excels in it.

Saxena, a commerce graduate, with a post-graduate diploma in marketing and advertising from Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, feels that his new responsibility is a great opportunity to work with an agency like Saints & Warriors. "The agency has done outstanding creative work in the past, and my role would be to add to the creative legacy."

On appointing Saxena, Jaffri tells afaqs! that he was an obvious candidate because of his prowess over Hindi. "Over 80 per cent of the ad films that we see on TV are in Hindi, and Saxena is one of the best exponents in Hindi writing. Also, he is very Indian in his thinking and extremely earthy."

Jaffri says that any recruitment at Saints & Warriors takes place only after the agency feels that the candidate understands the street reality of the country. "Saxena's understanding of India is from within and not from an outsider's point of view."