ISC Innovators makes five senior appointments

The agency named Thillai Varna as chief financial officer, Venkatesh Raj and special projects director, Joe Najib as interactive services director, Hor Wing Kit as creative director and Natalie Narayanan as public relations director.

Except for Hor, the others had worked at TBWA-ISC, the joint venture between ISC and TBWA that existed from 2001 to 2011. ISC Innovators currently has 25 employees, of which more than half are former employees of TBWA-ISC.

“It's like a coming home to ISC for most of us,” said Paul Lingan, executive creative director at ISC Innovators. “And we're now an even tighter band of Innovators than before.”

Austen Zecha, the co-founder of ISC in 1994, relaunched the agency in November 2011 after he retired from TBWA-ISC. Subsequently, TBWA rebranded the agency as a purely TBWA outfit.

TBWA entered Malaysia in 2001 via a joint-venture with Zecha and ISC forming the ISC Group of companies which then comprised TBWA-ISC, Tequila-Myalo, and Wizard Media Dynamics. The TBWA-ISC\ Malaysia advertising agency merged with sister integrated services company Tequila-Myalo\ Malaysia in 2009.

Under the ISC name, the agency was one of Tourism Malaysia's creative agencies for 12 years until last year when it withdrew from the tender process due to "ambiguity in the process".

Varna held the financial reigns of ISC from 1995/96 to 2004/5, including overseeing the financial transition from ISC to its initial TBWA affiliation in 1999/2000 and its joint-venture in TBWA-ISC by mid-2001.

He then served as the CFO for another communications agency and was a contributing columnist for a local communications trade journal, as well as a financial consultant for several manufacturing and service companies.

"We built up ISC from the mid-90s to the joint venture with TBWA and we're now committed to ISC's renaissance in this decade,” Varna added. “And we're even more confident than before of ISC's future direction.”

Raj has nearly 20 years' agency as well as marketing and sales experience, of which almost half of the tenure was with TBWA-ISC (2003 to early-2011), before joining Pernod Ricard Malaysia as marketing and sales manager.

With more than 15 years of experience in digital, Najib has been with a number of other digital agencies and interactive service companies over the past six years, culminating as the head of Malaysian operations for a US-based digital company.

A communications veteran of more than nine years, Narayanan rejoined ISC to take on the challenge of managing, supervising and further developing the agency’s corporate communications and public relations business. She worked as the public relations manager at the then TBWA-ISC.

Hor, meanwhile, is one of ISC Innovators' younger professionals at only 30, with experience in strategic marketing, branding, corporate identity, digital and integrated communications, PR and through-the-line creativity.

After the split, TBWA Group Malaysia saw several corporate and management changes, including Alrick Dorett to the expanded role of chief operating officer for both Singapore and Malaysia; two appointments to strengthen its creative team; as well as Sa’ad Hussein as the chief creative officer and executive director, looking after TBWA\Kuala Lumpur and Creative Juice\Kuala Lumpur.