Going solo, and loving it

When Mohammed Khan set up ad agency Enterprise in 1983, a client who got to know about it, Vazir Sultan Tobacco Company, gave him Rs 10 lakh. The client said, ‘Here, you'll need this. We'll address it as we go along'. That got Enterprise going, Khan fondly recalls in conversation with BrandLine . It also got a brand called Charms going great guns in the market, with a memorable and much talked about campaign.

“It's that relationship between the person at the client organisation and the creative person in the agency that creates great work. You want to do great things for people, not for money alone,” notes the veteran ad man, who called it quits after more than 40 years in advertising in end-2007.

Advertising is a people business. It takes people to conceive and create great campaigns, and it takes clients to trust the ability of those people to deliver, and buy into those campaigns. Such people also attract the like-minded, creating an enviable talent pool. In several cases, after having created a legacy of their own, such ‘independents' have also gone on to become part of global networks in their quest to grow.

What does it take to start an advertising agency or creative hot shop? Why are so many cropping up, and doing well?

Though Khan is admittedly not in tune with the newer players in the market, he should know a thing or two about starting agencies. He partnered Arun Nanda and Ajit Balakrishnan to set up Rediffusion in 1973. Five years later, he was alongside Sam Balsara and Indrani Sen as they created a new force in advertising called Contract. He is quick to acknowledge that while creative was (and is) the core of the agency, one needed other skills to set up shop back then, notable among them being media, in an integrated agency scenario.

The ad veteran also notes that even today, the core people needed to run an agency would be the marketing specialists, ‘money managers', and of course, the mainstay – creative people.

“Handling money is a very important part of the business. When creative people start handling money, they end up as third-rate creative people and fourth-rate money managers,” quips Khan.

There are several ad professionals who seem to have cracked the model successfully, with offerings ranging from full-service agencies to creative shops to design consulting firms and boutiques. Going by Khan's view, they must have partnered the right ‘money managers', besides getting the right creative and strategy people.

Sajan Raj Kurup's 80-plus team at CreativeLand Asia completed four years on a high in June 2011. Besides handling brands such as Frooti, Appy Fizz, Café Coffee Day, Hippo and Medimix, this year the agency bagged all the brands from the Audi stable in India on the back of a 3D campaign for the A8, which went on to be adopted globally. The former Regional Creative Director of Grey is now taking his creative journey into television and film production.

Pushpinder Singh, former National Creative Director (NCD) at Ambience Publicis, set up Saints & Warriors five years ago. After the popular Amul Macho commercials and work on client brands such as Frankfinn and Pantaloons, Singh felt the need to set up one more agency, Yang, in New Delhi. The going seems to be good, and Singh and his team are moving along with a ‘toing' in their step.

Former JWT NCD Agnello Dias and his former colleague, Santosh Padhi, once Leo Burnett Executive Creative Director, are changing the game with TapRoot India. If the bare-chested and war-painted Indian cricket stars for Pepsi's ICC Cricket World Cup campaign were a high-decibel delight, the same intensity came through the joy of long copy for DSP Black Rock Mutual Funds. There are more big-ticket campaigns on the anvil at the agency Dias and Padhi have nurtured since end-2008.

The Next Wave

Creative duo Manish Bhatt and Raghu Bhat, and their planning partner Joy Sengupta, from Contract, decided to launch Scarecrow Communications in February 2010. They forged a symbiotic association through a fourth founder, Vivek Suchanti, to present clients an integrated offering - including media. Scarecrow has tasted success, starting off with clients such as Shriram Transport Finance and businesses under Religare. The agency, with 40 people across Mumbai and Delhi offices, has gone on to bag work from Nestle India, Jindal Power and Steel, Henkel (Margo), Future Capital, Wadhwa Developers, Rupa Undergarments and Ackruti City. Quikr.com and education company Core Projects and Technologies came on board as clients for the agency's creative services this month.

Says Bhatt, “We brought in creative, strategy and design aspects of the communication. For PR, digital and media, we had systems in place to deliver integrated solutions seamlessly for clients. So far it's been well received.”

As Scarecrow scales up, does it run the risk of becoming ‘another large agency'? After all, the premise for a client to come to a smaller agency is personalised attention from the top minds at the agency to their account.

“I would say that is ‘the' real challenge,” he says. Scarecrow claims to have consciously tried to address the issue even while scaling up.

“The idea is to transfer our own equity to Scarecrow, and the team, and develop a strong team that shares this equity as an agency. We are not scared, therefore, of working with people who are our peers or even senior to us. In a lot of agencies, a lot of big honchos don't want to empower the second rung, for a lot of reasons. If large agencies don't do that, they'll lose out,” notes Bhatt.

Back to the Basics

More people are following suit, with more recent entrants being former CEO at Rediffusion Y&R Mahesh Chauhan, and NCD Minakshi Achan. They are a team of 20 people, at Salt Brand Solutions, with the promise of holistic solutions.

Chauhan reveals one of the reasons he set up Salt was the urge to go back to what he enjoyed most – account planning for client brands, which he could not do at Rediffusion, laden as he was with HR, finance and other responsibilities that come with being a CEO. “When you run a company of 400 people, you can't do strategy for client brands,” reflects Chauhan. In an 11-hour session in Lonavala on Saturday, Chauhan and Achan engaged their team in a workshop. The agenda was to get the people on board to ‘re-orient', and ‘shed the legacy, the baggage' that comes with years of working in a large agency.

“Large networks give you a lot of things, but the flexibility that an independent has is very high. We have no constraints in evolving to suit today's market,” says Chauhan.

Chauhan explains, “I have always felt that advertising is not a scalable business; it's a people business. We've decided to confine our size to 15 relationships, by which I mean 15 clients and their multiple brands. Also, unlike other start-ups, ours is holistic – as opposed to a creative boutique or design shop.” While he brings in the account planning expertise, Achan presents the creative leadership. Together with their team, they hope to do what they could not at Rediffusion.

According to Chauhan, the last balanced start-up with the right balance of planning and creative was Ambience, which saw the coming together of Elsie Nanji from Enterprise and Ashok Kurien from Rediffusion.

Salt has bagged the creative mandate for Kaya, Marico's chain of skin clinics. Without naming clients whom the agency is in the process of signing on, Chauhan reveals that a total of five businesses are on board. “The good thing is, we're not picking up small agency businesses. We won Kaya against a McCann and Leo Burnett,” notes Chauhan.

Salt is not the last outfit to be born of entrepreneurial ambitions of advertising professionals. The biggest investment required to get into the business of advertising or design is talent. The rest of the capital follows. So do clients.

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