Many of the major breaks in Shilpa Sinha’s career began the same way. She arrived in a new country knowing no one. She started by looking for suitable roles in a new culture, working with new languages and people with different assumptions about how the world worked. And, every time, she says, an angel appeared. Someone willing to take a bet on her potential before there was any track record to point to.
My most-needed breaks have been credited to women who saw my potential rather than my performance, because I had none in that country. There was always an angel in the form of a woman.
Shilpa calls herself a Global Indian. The phrase captures something essential about her: deeply rooted, yet perpetually in motion. She has worked across India, London, China, Russia, and Singapore. Today, she is Chief Strategy Officer of Global Markets for L’Oreal at McCann, previously serving as CSO-APAC for McCann. She got here by actively honoring her aspirations and making unexpected career choices.
The confidence to trust those instincts began much earlier.
Shilpa never learned to cook. Not because she couldn’t, but because she didn’t want to. Because she had a long list of other interests to pursue.
At the time when she was growing up in India, cooking was part of the unspoken curriculum of becoming a good woman and wife. It was a box to tick, evidence that you were prepared for the life expected of you. Shilpa wanted more. She wanted to read books. She wanted to sing and act. She wanted to learn breakdancing.
Her father looked at his daughter and told her she could learn cooking if she chose to. Not because she was expected to. It was a small act of permission that became the blueprint for the rest of her life.
Shilpa worked at India’s largest NGO, CRY, trying to change the world for the better before pursuing an MBA. She then began her post-MBA career at Unilever India as a marketer where she had multiple successful stints with global brands, including a worldview-changing secondment as The Assistant Private Secretary (The Commonwealth & Ethnic Communities) to The Prince of Wales. After-that, the prospect of a standard career path didn’t make her feel complete. She wanted to work with more diverse people and be inside the teams where ideas were currency and ‘freedom to be yourself’ was foundational.
So took a pay cut to make the move to the advertising industry as a strategist. Along the way, she describes, with characteristic candor a failed experiment as Chief Marketing Officer of a Studio in Bollywood, which did not fuel her intellectual and creative fire as she had expected. 16 years later, the creative side is unambiguously home.
“I never wanted it all. But what I wanted, I wanted wholly.”
What drew Shilpa to creative strategy was the opportunity to understand people more deeply. Working across countries has made her increasingly aware of how differently people experience the world. The assumptions, aspirations, and values that felt universal from a distance often turned out to be highly specific once you got closer, especially in a diverse market like Asia.
She describes herself as a work-in-progress toward becoming a master of culture. The ambition comes from years spent working across continents, listening carefully, and paying attention to the values, aspirations, and identities that shape the way people engage with brands and experience the world.
The temptation, she says, is to stay at the surface. The real work begins when you go deeper.
One of the projects Shilpa is most proud of began with a simple observation: women were changing the way they celebrated Diwali. For Indian women, Diwali is often celebrated with in-laws or nuclear families, along with the expectations that come with it: how to dress, how to behave, and what rituals to perform. But with her team, Shilpa uncovered another story. Women were creating their own celebrations with friends and sisters, gathering outside the home and reclaiming the festival on their own terms.
For L’Oréal Paris India, that insight became the foundation for a campaign centred on a new ritual of sisterhood. Shot by an all-female crew and created by some of India’s most celebrated creative talent, including lyricist Prasoon Joshi. The campaign transformed a familiar festive category into something more personal: a celebration of choice, sisterhood and self-expression.
For Shilpa, it drew on everything she loves about India: its traditions, its complexity, and its capacity to evolve while remaining connected to its roots. The message became, “I can choose to light up Diwali in my way, with my people, in a way that has never been done before,” she explains, eyes shining.
What made the work meaningful was mindfulness of culture’s evolution, in real time, with depth.
If the Diwali campaign reflected Shilpa’s understanding of one evolving cultural ritual, The Truth About Ascending Asia expanded that same curiosity across an entire region. A landmark study launched at Cannes in 2024, led by Shilpa and McCann Truth Central, combining quantitative research with deep cultural immersion across twelve markets.
The project challenged brands to move beyond one-size-fits-all global thinking and engage deeper with the essence of modern Asia. The Study’s insights proved remarkably prescient. Among them was the identification of Pop Mart as an emerging cultural force months before it became a global phenomenon.
Whether she’s presenting research at Cannes or discussing a campaign idea with a client, connection, for Shilpa, is visceral. Numbers are critical for measuring impact, but equally important is the feeling that the work evokes and the behaviors it elicits. That is when she knows, we’ve hit on something big.
Following your own path sounds romantic. Living with the consequences is harder. The part Shilpa has had to protect most actively throughout her career is her self-worth.
Choosing your own life often means disappointing people who had different plans for it. Many of her choices sat outside the expectations placed on women of her generation and background. She chose not to have children but to become a trailing spouse. She chose not to pursue stereotyped designations of ultimate career success, like CEO. She chose to focus on her love of strategy, working on brands that fulfil her soul. She rejected assumptions about what a successful or ‘complete’ woman should want, or how she should live or dress.
Through it all, she returned to a lesson her father taught her early in life: do right by yourself first. Only then can you do right by others.
For Shilpa, it has always been about living one’s truth. Perhaps that is why she feels such admiration for Frida Kahlo. She looks up to her not only as an artist but as a woman who lived on her own terms. Someone who celebrated her culture, created extraordinary work without conforming to expectations of how a woman should look, or exist in the world and rise above life’s challenges.
That particular form of unapologetic self-expression is something Shilpa has spent her own life moving towards.
She hopes more young women will bring their ideas and passion to the creative industry. What keeps her in the industry after all these years is surprisingly simple. Every few years, a project comes along that feels bigger than the brief. An idea that brings different perspectives, experiences, and talents together to create something none of them could have produced alone. Those are the rare moments that make it all worthwhile, and the reason she still believes this industry can be a place of extraordinary possibility.
When asked to imagine her mark, she sees an infinity loop that’s iridescent, psychedelic, and alive with color. Art, travel, music, fashion, culture, relationships, and ideas spiraling together while remaining connected to a strong centre.
“It’s fluid, yet centered. It’s unbound, and it’s multifaceted. That’s me.”
The image feels fitting for a woman who has spent her life crossing borders. Deeply rooted, yet perpetually absorbing and keeping an entire industry connected with the moving pulse of culture.
HerMark is a visual and narrative study of women shaping the marketing, advertising, and communications industry. Branding in Asia is publishing the ongoing series in partnership with HerMark.
Learn more at hermark.world
