Because We Challenged Marketing...

Closing in on 40, leaving behind a successful an 18-year career in building products and technology in Bay area, an engineer by thought and practice; well I have no business running an agency or doing what I do today! Or do I?

When I first ventured into the agency world with my partners in crime Girisha Gowda, Kishore Karumbaiah and Ruchir Punjabi, I thought: How hard can this be? It’s marketing and advertising after all. Well… I was wrong! Soon enough, we realized that we were venturing far beyond the boundaries of a front-page newspaper ad or a 30-second radio spot or a minute-long TVC. What we were doing was far beyond marketing and advertising itself!

We’ve seen folks from ad agencies, at least the creative ones, walk into technology parks with a “where the hell am I? Get me out of here!” look on their face. At the same time, We’ve heard my colleagues from technology space talk about the cacophony, the madness, and the lack of a conducive working environment after their visit to an ad agency.

Now, we were trying to bring these worlds together. We were trying to find a third door which opened into a place where data, creativity, and technology lived happily ever after, constantly innovating to create mind-blowing connected experiences for consumers and brands alike. There was a world.

The thought was great. The market needed someone with the right balance between creativity, data, and technology. But we weren’t the first guys to try and solve this. It’s not that we had no predecessors. It’s just that we had no truly successful ones, from an Indian context. And now, it’s been 6 years spent creating such an agency with true creative technologists. So, have we been successful? No! But have we failed? No!

Take a truly right-brained person and a really left-brained one and leave them in a room to solve a problem. You bet you going to have a lot of fun watching them front outside. After all, it will be a clash of two mind-sets. And from our vantage point, we notice that this is the greatest challenge – trying to truly blend two mind-sets, behaviours, prejudices, conditioning of the mind, assumptions, understanding, and more importantly two belief systems.

This is no easy task! Try changing your own mind-set about something you have stood by forever and you will realize how hard it can be. At some point, you’re bound to get stuck. And this is what happens every day in Langoor, in every conversation, in every decision, in every hire, in every fire, in every success, in every failure, in every pitch, in every project, in every argument… you get my drift.

But, in the end, magic does happen. But creating this magic consistently is the challenge. In these 6 years, we have learnt a few lessons that have helped us manage our right-brained folks and our left-brained folks equally well.

 At every step, in a traditional agency or technology company, there usually is only one mindset at work. And that is where balance is lost. The fun really lies in a place where strategy, data, creativity, and technology come together every day and strike a balance to solve for a client’s brand or business outcome. Why is it fun?

 Because we believe that we are really not whom we work as. We are not our educational qualifications either. There is more to all of us than what we do or what we have done. We are beyond “roles” and at every step, we are always trying to move beyond our current existence. But it’s not to say that we are a jack of all trades and a master of none. On the contrary, we are a jack of all trades and a master of many.

 We’ve always lived in a world filled with ambiguity, uncertainty, and chaos. And this kind of world makes us explore things that have never been done before. We are constantly learning new ways to meet our consumers’ expectations and this in itself becomes an opportunity for us to grow as individuals. That’s where not just knowing how to dream comes into the picture, but knowing how to control them also becomes a skill. We keep a reality-check and believe that every dream is realized as a journey, not a miracle or an accident.

 We created a new breed of Digital Marketing company that partners with marketers which challenges the very way marketers make sense of the digital disruption and navigate their way to create impact. We go beyond the elementary impact of digital in terms of search, social and storytelling, and look at customer journeys in the digital domains and focus all our action based on insights of consumer digital behavior and contextualize our marketing mix strategies and action.

That’s exactly why we welcomed the chance to be a part of the Havas Group – to explore what’s possible, and be a digital agency that the future demands, not 5 years down the line, but starting today.

Here is how we’re going to make it happen: Strength of Havas Group (present in 100+ countries, and is part of French conglomerate The Vivendi Group) is to build meaningful brands based on music, content, gaming, creativity and with this partnership we have now strength of data, technology, and digital innovation.

We believe the future of marketing is all about bringing cultural transformation and we are now the only player in India who can deliver this transformation by seamlessly marrying all the pieces together.