MUMBAI: McCann Erickson has roped in Alok Lall as executive director McCann Worldgroup to replace Debashis Paul, who moves on to head the newly formed outfit McCann Social.

Lall, who recently quit as MD Iris India, will now be directly in charge of running the Delhi operations. This will be his second stint at McCann Erickson; he previously worked at McCann as an account director for a year from1996-97. 
 
Lall started his career as an account executive at FS Advertising in 1989, before moving to DraftFCB Ulka as senior account executive. Then he joined JWT as account supervisor and worked for two years from 1993 to 1995, from where he shifted to McCann for a year with the same profile.

From McCann, Lall once again moved to JWT, where he worked for about 13 years before joining Saatchi & Saatchi Delhi as branch head and executive vice-president. 
 
Lall then, co-founded the Indian office of Iris worldwide four years ago in 2007, with Stewart Shanley, the agency‘s global chief operating officer, and Kenneth Augustine, creative director, iris India which provides integrated service to companies such as Sony Ericsson, Dell, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Shell, Alpha G Corp and adidas.

Says McCann Worldgroup executive chairman Prasoon Joshi, "In our changing media landscape, Lall‘s drive towards new age media solutions will immensely value add to our offering and expertise." 
 
Lall‘s responsibility at McCann will be also to drive a broader integrated approach for all McCann clients.

About Paul‘s movement, Joshi says that Paul was keen to explore the social media for some time now. "Socially relevant advertising is an emerging need in the rapidly evolving development sector of our country. And I can see no one better to be at the helm of this," says Joshi.

Paul has spent more than a decade with the agency and has been heading the Delhi branch since 2007.