Alvin James Saldanha is Founder and Chief Creative Officer of brandarms, a 9-year-old boutique advertising agency located in Mumbai.
Education
Alvin finished his schooling at Don Bosco High School in 1977, Mumbai, and attended College at [[R A Podar College of Commerce and Economics]] in Mumbai upto 1982. He also secured a Bachelor's Degree in Biblical Studies, with Honours, from the Maryland Bible College and Seminary, Baltimore, USA.
Professional career
Alvin has 36 years of advertising experience: he began his career in 1982 at Hindustan Thompson Associates, now JWT, and has been Creative Director with Rediffusion Dentsu Young & Rubicam in 1986, Vice President and Executive Creative Director with the McCann Worldgroup till 2005, and Executive Creative Director at Spark44.
He has also won national and international awards, including 2 New York Awards Finalist Certificates, an EFFIE for HSBC and a Certificate of Excellence at the 2005 RX Awards in New York for the International Osteoporosis Foundation TV commercial, which ran simultaneously in 26 countries.
Teaching
Alvin speaks regularly at B Schools across the country and conducts workshops on Advertising, Brands and Creativity. He has taught at IIM Ahmedabad, IIT Mumbai, The Jamnalal Bajaj Institute for Management Studies, The Sydenham Institute of Management, and Christ University in Bangalore among many others. He has spoken at the Williams College in Mass., USA, at their invitation.He is also Permanent Visiting Faculty at the GRD School of International Business and GRD Institute of Management for their MBA and MIB streams. He has been invited to address the marketing cadre of many companies including Google, NDTV Worldwide, Globalspace Technologies, gsk, Piramal Healthcare, Landmark Insurance and Dr Reddy's Laboratories, where he also conducted an intensive on social media's potential and proof-of-profit for the pharma industry at their annual UDAAN exercise. He has also conducted a series of Healthcare Communications intensives at the Asian Heart Institute in Mumbai a the invitation of Dr. Ramakanta Panda.
He was the keynote speaker at the International Conference on International Marketing of The University of Central Lancashire, U.K., and at the Confederation of Indian Industry 2011 TIDES conclave.
In February 2012, Alvin conducted an hour-long interview video streaming with the NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, held at the GRDSCIB campus in Coimbatore, India. The video interview was streamed from Moscow and was organised by the United States Consulate General in Chennai and NASA.