EMERGING ENTREPRENEUR AWARDS. Aiming to be the Infy of digital marketing

First-generation entrepreneur Vinod Nambiar, 44, has a lofty dream for his fledgling digital marketing agency, Position2 Marketing Pvt Ltd, which he co-founded with Rajiv Parikh in 2006.

“In the next seven years, I want Position2 Marketing to be the Infosys of digital marketing and hit the $100-million milestone,” said Nambiar, co-founder and Managing Director, Global Delivery, who is based in Bengaluru. 

From 20 clients and a 25-member team in 2006, Position2 Marketing has 60 clients, most of them based in the US, with a 160-member team across two offices in the US and India.

Nambiar, an electronics engineer with a post-graduate qualification in marketing management from IMDR Pune, and a classmate, started a company that sold electronics components sourced from various places to industries in Pune; this did not hold his interest for long.

A stint with Urja, an advertising agency in Mumbai, combined with the boom in internet-based firms in the mid-1990s, got him hooked to the idea of digital marketing/advertising.

“I quit Urja and joined DBS to set up their media division and within 18 months I quit to found Webshastra, a pioneer in the online advertising space. A meeting with Parikh, who incorporated Position2 Inc in the US, and a common vision that we both had, of using Indian creativity/analytical skills to offer digital marketing services to global customers, was enough for us to join hands. “Position2 Marketing was set up in India as a fully owned subsidiary of Position2 Inc,” recounts Nambiar.

They built a world-class “social listening” product called Brand Monitor, which was sold to a US company in 2012.

The agency provides end-to-end digital marketing services, including, management of pay-per-click campaigns, digital marketing operations such as designing, sending and tracking e-mailers, and content marketing where it creates content and re-purposes it into videos, info-graphics and charts.

Position2 Marketing serves marquee clients such as Amazon, CA, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Cox & Kings and Mindtree.