40 Under 40 2022: Dia Kirpalani, Blink Digital

Dia Kirpalani

Head of strategy
Blink Digital
India

Pushing herself and her team outside their comfort zones comes naturally to Dia Kirpalani. She has been described as someone who would (bungee) jump off the highest cliff without batting an eyelid. But importantly, she knows when to take the leap of faith in business as in life.

Kirpalani injects a degree of irreverence into every project, enabling her team of strategists to take on tasks in new and exciting ways. By providing them with a safety net and supporting out-of-the-box ideas, her team won 37 awards in the last 12 months alone. ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund’s Quest2Invest campaign was recognised for its innovative use of data both in India and internationally. It also won a Grand Prix at the DMA Asia Echo Awards and a Gold at The Golden Award of Montreaux this year.

In the two years she has been at Blink Digital, Kirpalani has been instrumental in bringing end-to-end thinking to the strategy table resulting in 130% more new business wins than the previous year, including Amazon Prime Music and ZEE5. She has also contributed towards 100% of account retention of all existing clients such as KFC, Johnson & Johnson, Hamilton and Amazon.in. Under her leadership, the creative strategy revenue for the agency went up by 25% on a year-on-year basis.

Kirpalani’s expertise as a powerhouse strategist cannot be doubted. Listerine, a J&J brand, has witnessed it personally, winning big at The Work as well as the DMA Asia Echo Awards, for its tremendously effective DCO campaign. Over 3,800 ads were created and put out in real time, contextual to the audience, the time of day, and the platform, leading to a campaign that outperformed benchmarks across the board.

During her stint at Contract Advertising, where she went around as a ‘client whisperer’, she was responsible for running strategy for 11 key clients, all of whom saw a slew of gains. One beauty brand achieved a 85% year-on-year revenue increase due to a restructured channel strategy run by her.

Kirpalani believes in enabling women’s voices to be heard both within the team and in client-agency interactions, and 80% of her team of strategists are women.