Neela Marikkar
Chairperson / Managing Director

Neela has been in the communications industry for the last 25 years
and has vast experience in the field of advertising, promotions and
public relations. She is the Chairperson/Managing Director of Sri
Lanka’s leading marketing communications organization the Grant
Group which is in partnership with McCann Worldgroup USA. The
Grant Group covers advertising, public relations, event marketing,
outdoor advertising, Audio Video production and Digital counting in
their portfolio blue chip clients like Sri Lankan Airlines, Fonterra,
Unilever, Mastercard, John Keells, Sampath Bank to name a few.
Neela has had her undergraduate university education in India and
later in the USA and lived and worked in the UK for over 10 years.
During her stay in London she was actively involved in the travel trade
in developing and promoting specialist holidays to the Far East. She
has also worked in publishing.
Neela was chosen by McCann Worldgroup to follow a leadership
development program at Columbia University Graduate School of
Business, New York.
She has been the President of the 4As, the Charter President of the
International Advertising Association, was a member of the Board of
the Fair Trading Commission and served as the Chairperson of the
sub committee on Communications & Social Mobilization of the
National Advisory Council for Peace and Reconciliation. She was a
Board Member of the American Chamber of Commerce. Neela was
also a recipient of the Zonta ‘Woman of Achievement’ award and
recently awarded for her outstanding work in the field of Advertising by
the Women in Management Organization.
She was the Chairperson of Sri Lanka First, a group of senior
business leaders that promoted economic development as an
effective means of post conflict reconstruction. She played an active
role both locally and internationally She was a Consultant to the
United Nations Development Program’s Invest-in-Peace Project, to
promote peace, stability, and development through a series of
outreach programs both at a local level and internationally to revive
the country's war-torn economy. In late 2002 she helped coordinate
the bi-communal meeting organized and sponsored by Sri Lanka First
for some 100 members of the Sri Lankan Diaspora in New York City to
coincide with the Sri Lankan Prime Minister’s visit to New York to
address the UN General Assembly. In May 2004 she led a group of

senior Sri Lanka business leaders to South Africa at the invitation of
the National Business Initiative, to study the role business played in
South Africa’s Peace Process.

• More recently she was among the selected delegates at the
  Women Waging Peace Conference who was also invited to be a
  panelist at their general colloquium held at the John F. Kennedy
  School of Government at Harvard University for two consecutive
  years. She has been a speaker at several international forums
  including the Hague on the role of business in achieving the UN
  MDG goals. The Table of Free Voices in Berlin, The European
  Commission, Brussels.