Talented.Agency launches new agency 'The New Thing'

Just one-and-a-half year into its launch, the creative ideas shop, Talented.Agency, has decided to build its ‘Talented grid of agencies’ with the launch of The New Thing (TNT), a new social and cultural marketing agency that is aimed at changing everything ‘typical’.

The independent agency co-founders, Gautam Reghunath and PG Aditiya, will be joined by the former-Swiggy and Tinder Social Media Lead, Viren Sean Noronha, who has now shifted to the agency side to take charge as the co-founder of the newly formed agency.

Staffed entirely by creators, TNT’s primary focus is to help their brands create cultural conversations and moments on social, something that they believe very few brands are getting right, and not shy away from keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of the internet.

Sharing his views on the launch of TNT Noronha said, “Getting social right is hard. And, the way agencies and brands look at it needs a desperate refresh. My experience at Swiggy and Tinder showed me evidence of a crucial shift - it’s not about what your brand is saying, it’s about what people are saying about your brand. To keep yourself relevant you need to lean into those conversations. You need to contribute to internet culture with your content. And, you need creators who do that for themselves every day, as part of your team.”

“Look at some of India’s most popular campaigns over the last few years - It’s not that people hate advertising, they just hate boring ads. Great advertising or social doesn’t force your audience to talk about you, it invites them to. And it certainly doesn’t need ‘30 posts a month’ to do that. The New Thing wants to help brands be in charge of those conversations, whether it’s ‘daily social’ or ‘spike campaigns’. We want to make brands work for the internet, not the other way around. I’m now excited to begin with colleagues and partners who, like me, believe that social done right is a growth function, not a cost centre,” he added.

Similarly, the Talented co-founders also emphasised that while Noronha has executed some of the “most talked about” social-first campaigns in India, they think that he has been masquerading as a brand-side marketer and an agency-side creative these last few years.

“Now in his avatar as a creative entrepreneur, we simply want to liberate him and his founding team and help them launch the social and culture agency of their dreams,” they said.

Along with this, they also pointed out that there’s a clear reason behind launching TNT as a separate agency. They said, “Right from the kind of talent needed to workflow and processes, it’s become evidently clear that specialised social-first creative mandates for brands have to be run very differently from wider creative mandates. It’s equally exciting to see what an agency staffed and run entirely by creators looks like. It gives our clients a direct line to people who are shaping internet culture. All of this means we now believe we have a disruptive take on the business behind social-first creativity.”

Sharing more intel on the nomenclature of the newest agency under the creative shop of Talented, Noronha said, “Funnily, The New Thing is both the company’s name and the heart of its business model. The name holds us accountable to our own definition of disruption - to do things so differently that it destroys the old methods. To brands, it offers instant clarity on who we are- a shorthand that communicates that we’re not shy about keeping up with trends and how the internet is moving. So, our clients shouldn’t be either. The New Thing is going to change how social media can work for brands in India.”

On Talented’s future ambitions, Aditiya and Reghunath shared that this model is how they currently envision scaling Talented and their brand- by enabling creative entrepreneurs their own platform to build from, instead of assuming they can simply incubate a new practice internally by themselves.

“At the core of our new ‘Talented grid of agencies’ will sit Talented itself - an ideas shop, a medium-agnostic creative agency staffed by the brightest creative talent in the market. Specialised agencies like The New Thing and potentially others in the future will be organised under and report into Talented- therefore having the ability to tap into this grid of shared services, while continuing to run as independent shops with their own unique personalities and specialisation. So, if you’ve got a disruptive new take on creative-adjacent businesses and want to begin, text us!” they said.

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