FleishmanHillard Announces Vijaya Varilly as UK Head of Youth and Partnerships

Today, FleishmanHillard UK announces that Vijaya Varilly has been hired as the UK head of youth & partnerships working as a senior cultural strategist across global activations within the Global Culture Unit. Vijaya’s role will also see her offering cultural strategic insights across the agency’s existing client portfolio, working closely with client leads.

She will report to Lauren Winter, global managing director of consumer culture and EMEA head of brand and lifestyle marketing who commented: “I’m delighted our team continues to grow with another stellar specialist joining our ranks. Vijaya will be bringing her years of experience and strategic expertise to our cultural briefs across our diverse portfolio of clients and partners. Leading as a specialist in Youth & Partnerships and working into the Global Culture Unit team, she will be pivotal for us as we forge ahead and continue to establish industry-changing work, enabling us to challenge the status quo.” 

Vijaya has over 10 years of experience in strategic services, during which she worked with major clients such as Veuve Clicquot, Tiffany and Amazon. Her skills range from running and briefing qualitative research to creative brief writing, strategic platform development and workshop planning. Expanding on her skillset and passions in her spare time, Vijaya created and executed an award-winning and fully integrated purpose-driven campaign to raise awareness of missed smear tests with fashion label Miss Pap. Vijaya will be joining FleishmanHillard UK from W Communications and has previously worked at Ogilvy, Mission and John Wiley and Sons. 

Speaking of the opportunity, Vijaya said, “The spirit of youth is unparalleled, and the way the youth of today behave and communicate globally is constantly evolving at a rapid speed. For this reason, it’s more essential than ever to have a dedicated approach to follow, analyse and implement learnings from our next generation of thinkers and innovators. I’m so excited to lead a team that recognises the power of youth, culture and partnerships and look forward to using global insights to create game-changing campaigns and future-facing strategies that the world wants to talk about.” 

The Global Culture Unit works across FleishmanHillard’s top 200 clients offering below-the-line cultural insights that lead to braver community-changing campaigns. To date, it has seen hugely successful launches such as working to advance the lives of the 1.2bn persons with disabilities with the award-winning WeThe15 campaign, catapulting Crocs into the world of high fashion, uniting Krispy Kreme and Xbox for a fan-favourite collaboration and partnering with UNSTEREOTYPE and Harvard University.