Talented: Is “the Next Uncommon” Being Built in India?
For Gautam Reghunath and PG Aditiya, creativity is a habit. Their shared resume includes groundbreaking work that’s taken on caste discrimination, decolonised the British Museum’s tour, immortalised nonagenarian freedom fighters, and convinced a biscuit company to become a fashion brand. So it should come as no surprise to learn that Talented, the agency they founded together, has developed a similar penchant for work that pushes boundaries. In their own words, they’re keen to ensure they continue to “suck at mediocrity”.
For a young agency (Talented is yet to turn three), it’s an impressive reputation to have earned. Speaking exclusively to LBB, Gautam and PG explain that their reference points have come from independently-minded agencies across the globe who have managed to blend scale with culture, such as Uncommon in the UK, or GUT and Mischief in North America. It’s a hopeful belief in creativity’s present and future which purposefully stands in sharp contrast to the “network-dominated who’s-who” of the industry’s recent decades.
On which note, neither founder holds back from diagnosing the industry’s present-day problems. “The truth is that we are an industry with relatively few role-model companies, and we’re plagued by self-inflicted problems”, says PG. “We’ve noticed that the truly great agencies of the world have remained independent in spirit even if not strictly in their business models, and that isn’t a coincidence. We believe that these are the agencies who are going to define the industry’s creative future - and just how ‘creative’ that future is going to be”.
Scanning through the talent now housed within Talented, it doesn’t take long to realise that PG and Gautam mean business. The agency’s founding team is India’s most-awarded over the past decade, and boasts the highest combined total of Cannes Lion wins in the country’s history. But this is not a team that’s focused on the past. “The ideas we had in our heads for what a modern creative agency needed to look like necessitated a blank slate”, says Gautam. “What we required was a fresh new canvas to radically reimagine what an agency looks like: both for our clients, and the talent working in this industry”.
The two founders were CEO and CCO at Dentsu, but made the leap to start anew with their own creative shop in the same year that Dentsu picked up the Agency of the Year award in Cannes. It was a bold step fraught with risk but, as the pair describe it, utterly necessary.
“The likes of Uncommon or Mischief are brands within themselves, and we value that”, says PG. “In an era where agencies don’t take their own brands seriously, we’re very vocal about how we go about our work, the things we care about, the things we love and the things that need to change”.
Despite the disruptive approach, however, Talented is resolutely grounded in the wider agency world. “We love the agency business, it’s just that - for all our industry’s reputation as being great creatives - we’ve always been strangely conservative in the way we work ourselves”, posits Gautam. “We’re too comfortable with letting things be. Talented was started as a response to the agency world’s doubts about its own future - because we believe that we have ideas which can fundamentally alter what our business means”.
So, they’re putting their money where their mouths are. Talented is the only agency in India which is upwards of 20% employee-owned, with a financial structure shaped by equity allocations and stock options. So, as Gautam puts it, “when clients work with us they know that the agency staff working on their brand have actual skin-in-the-game. They’re owners of the company themselves - so of course that shows in the work”.
On top of that, and in a move akin to the early days of Wieden+Kennedy, Talented’s employee handbook has been uploaded online for all to see. The company makes no secret of the fact that its starting salaries are around two times higher than the local industry standard, allows for remote work from anywhere (provided staff visit HQ in Bangalore for at least one week per quarter), and allows for side hustles which avoid a conflict of interest. In an industry which so often trips over itself when it comes to employee welfare and standard practices, Talented offers a refreshing bolt of clarity.
Their big bet, ultimately, is that this culture and identity will trickle down into the work. “Our belief is that the positive effects of our radically simple-but-new policies will add to the work and result in the greatest group of creative professionals ever assembled in Indian advertising over the next few years”, says Gautam. “And as a direct result of all of this, our clients and the brands we work with will end up having the best agency experience of their lives”.
There’s no lack of ambition within Talented, and the agency is already walking the walk. Their client portfolio is already 100 names strong, ranging from Swiggy, Makemytrip, Google and Flipkart to old-school giants like Britannia and Tanishq. They’ve built brands like Urban Company through an entirely new positioning, and helped Britannia navigate a new generation of consumers. They’ve created Flipkart’s most successful off-season sale, and launched Google’s flagship phones in India. Throughout it all, Gautam and PG believe that Talented’s distinctive culture and approach is the platform upon which these creative wins have been built.
“Our creative success is a direct consequence of countless other things we’ve got right - the way creative talent is hired, to how new business approaches are meticulously planned, to the agency’s corporate strategy, to sharing the creative ambition with brand partners, to reverse-mentoring, to taking affirmative action on diversity and inclusion, and simply taking care of our creative talent”, says PG.
But perhaps what’s most refreshing and inspiring about PG and Gautam is simply that they believe in the future; and more specifically in creativity’s future. It’s not the wide-eyed naivety of a recent ad school grad who’s trying to emulate the Mad Men era, but rather the battle-hardened creative chops of people who know what works in this industry and why. They believe that the golden era of Indian advertising is in the industry’s near future, not its distant past. But that belief is grounded in a fair and frank assessment of the present day.
“These are challenging times for creativity”, says PG. “The world’s richest man is a guy who brags about never advertising his brands, and is currently at war with the industry - it’s easy to see why some CMOs might be tempted to buy into that rhetoric”.
So PG and Gautam see creativity as a category, and their job is to grow that category. “We are a proud creative shop, and we hope that people will turn to us because we’re the best”, says PG. “But anything that grows creativity as a category is good news for us. We need to stop behaving like this giant behemoth of an industry and more like an upstart category - because we have to prove ourselves. There has to be good work out there, so that belief in creativity as a viable option grows”.
Therefore, the two founders see Talented as having a place at the vanguard of a new creative story - one which re-asserts its necessity for any aspiring brand. “Everything is becoming so homogenised in terms of efficiency and productivity that it’s never been more important to have an unfair advantage like creativity on your side”, surmises Gautam. “It’s easy to make ads that people want to ignore. After all, every bad ad on YouTube is a great ad for YouTube Premium. Creativity is how you break free from that noise”.
Ultimately, Talented’s story is about precisely that: Breaking free. Free from the industry’s past, free from unspoken rules and norms invented for a bygone era. And free from the paralysing, pervasive perception that the ‘good old days’ are behind us. For Gautam, PG, and Talented, they’re very much ahead.
