Bates CHI & Partners to acquire Bengaluru-based Temple Advertising

Temple advertising's founders will join Bates CHI & Partners India as CEO and CCO.

Bates CHI & Partners has agreed to acquire the business and assets of Bengaluru-based boutique advertising agency, Temple Advertising. The agency was founded in 2004 by Manmohan Anchan, Vidur Vohra and Srikanth V S.

To underline the partnership and collaboration principles of this company, the agencies in Bengaluru will merge and become Bates CHI & Temple, with the rest of the network retaining the original Bates CHI & Partners branding.

Srikanth V S will be CEO and Anchan will be CCO of Bates CHI & Partners in India. They will jointly assume the role of managing partners of the group overseeing all five Bates CHI & Partners offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Dhaka.

David Mayo, CEO, Bates CHI & Partners, says, "Bates CHI & Partners' defined business mission is to create big ideas for ambitious brands. In developing our strategy in India, we are building a creative network with scale. Temple is a renowned creative agency with a strong reputation and a broad vision of the world and with them around the table, we will deliver on this promise."

Srikanth says, "We are incredibly excited to be part of a new agency set up in a new India environment and we hope to capture this new mood to build our business."

Anchan adds, "At Temple, we pride ourselves on our work. If it sells, it's working. If it builds a brand, it's working. We don't create work for clients or juries, we create work that works. The time is right for a new agency in India to give variety to the current order of things."

For the record, Temple has worked with clients across diverse categories such as automotive, education, fashion and retail, FMCG, food, media and entertainment, real estate and technology. Its clients include Embassy Group, ETV Kannada, Future Lifestyle Fashions (including Indigo Nation, Scullers, Manchester United, Jealous21), Pearson Education, Reliance Trends, Sumeru Frozen Foods, TVS Motors, Vaswani Group and Wipro Technologies.

Anchan was creative director and national resource at Ogilvy India, before setting up Temple. He has worked on LG Electronics, Titan watches, HLL, TVS Motors, 3M, Louis Philippe, Allen Solly, Arrow, Lee, Mico, Enamor lingerie, MTR Foods, Deccan Herald, IBM and Air Lanka. He has also directed more than two dozen TV commercials for clients like HLL and Titan, as well as being involved in feature films.

Srikanth, meanwhile, spent the better part of his career at Ogilvy before co-founding Temple. His stints at Ogilvy included one year at RMG David (the then second agency of Ogilvy) as vice-president South, and one and a half years at Ogilvy Mumbai as the global head on Castrol/British Petroleum's truck lubricant business, and head of Lever's and Cadbury's food business. Since 2004, Srikanth's primary job has been to grow Temple, and to build its equity with an ever widening set of clients.