Pooja Manek is a creative leader, a Cannes Lion Winner, and a changemaker in one. She gets immense fulfillment from being a people-gatherer, which led her to host and lead India’s first Cannes Lions See It Be It event in 2025. Over 200 women delegates comprising women creatives, account managers and strategists spent a day listening to talks and panels by inspiring female leaders, making the first-ever edition a striking and meaningful success. This year she is serving as jury for the Cannes Lions Young Lions Central Asia competition, and the Adfest 2026.

In 2025 she served as jury at the D&AD awards in London, chosen to judge the ‘Writing For Advertising’ category. In 2024, she was 1 of the 19 women leaders chosen from 1400 applications from across the globe, to represent India at the Cannes Lions See It Be It programme, a bespoke leadership accelerator for rising female and non-binary leaders. She was also invited to various global stages as a speaker–Adfest 2024, Digital Marketing Association Sri Lanka Summit 2024, and Madstars 2024, to highlight radical insights on the impact of AI and the power of human emotions on the creative process, through her keynote ‘AI Can’t Get Angry. You Can.’ In 2021, she was the only Indian on the Next Creative Leaders list, awarded by The One Club and 3% movement. As the founding member of talented, one of the very few employee-owned agencies in the world, Pooja is trying to reimagine the agency experience by changing everything that she has been angry about–in her previous stint and with the industry at large, such as pay disparity, credit hogging, no work-life balance, lack of representation, to name a few. She’s also a part of the adjunct faculty at MICA and Miami Ad School, helping shape the creativity and voices of the next generation of stellar creatives.