Mr. Sonal Dabral was born in India and studied Visual Communications at India’s foremost design school, the National Institute of Design. Instead of making him the next Paul Rand or Tibor Kalman, the universe had other designs and threw him into a career in advertising and he is Deeply passionate about Advertising, Blackjack and Single Malts. 


He joined Ogilvy Mumbai in 1991 and, in partnership with Mr. Piyush Pandey, drove the agency from creative anonymity to India’s No.1 creative agency. Then came Ogilvy Kuala Lumpur in 1999. Within three years as the ECD, Mr. Sonal Dabral helped Ogilvy turn into the most awarded agency and one of the top creative offices in Asia.  In 1999 the Times Of India, a leading Indian newspaper had named Mr. Sonal Dabral as one of the 50 young Indians who will lead India into the next century. Perhaps to keep that promise he returned to India in 2011 as the Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of DDB Mudra Group. 


Mr. Sonal Dabral is also a very popular speaker and has spoken at major festivals like Spikes Asia, Dubai Lynx, Cristal Advertising Festival, Turkey, LIA, besides numerous engagements across Asia. He successfully woke up a sleepy audience in Taiwan by singing an impromptu Bollywood song during a presentation sometime in 2005.

In his earlier avatar, Mr. Sonal Dabral has been a popular TV host on prime time television, a Bollywood scriptwriter and has also been channelling his passion for films into directing ad films. His future plans include being a filmmaker on weekdays and a Pro Blackjack player on weekends. 


Ogilvy & Mather is a New York City-based advertising, marketing and public relations agency. It started as a London advertising agency founded in 1850 by Edmund Mather, which in 1964 became known as Ogilvy & Mather after merging with a New York City agency that was founded in 1948 by David Ogilvy. It is part of the WPP Group, which is by revenue one of the largest marketing and communications companies in the world. The agency is known for its work with Dove, American Express, and IBM. 


Ogilvy & Mather was built on Ogilvy's principles, in particular, that the function of advertising is to sell and that successful advertising for any product is based on information about its consumer. His entry into the company of giants started with several iconic campaigns: "The man in the Hathaway shirt" with his aristocratic eye patch; "The man from Schweppes is here" introduced Commander Whitehead, the elegant, bearded Brit, bringing Schweppes (and "Schweppervesence") to the United States.; "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock"; and "Pablo Casals is coming home – to Puerto Rico", a campaign that Ogilvy said helped change the image of a country and was his proudest achievement. "Only Dove is one-quarter moisturizing cream". This campaign helped Dove become the top selling soap in the U.S.