Profitable since the early days, Talented wants to take it slow to beat mediocrity

Founded in February 2022, Talented.Agency is led by Gautam Reghunath and PG Aditiya, serving as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Creativity Officer, respectively. The duo have taken a call to take it slow and only do 12-15 campaigns to avoid mediocrity.

Aditiya said that one of the super uphill tasks that the comparatively new yet known agency has tried to internalise is sucking at mediocrity because in his opinion, the fact that every agency is like three bad campaigns away from being a shadow of who they used to be, stands true.

“Mediocrity is a skill in itself and not a lack of skill. At Talented, we’ve normalised the idea of letting go of tactics which come into play in a typical agency-client relationship. A typical agency comes up with two routes- the one which they want to work upon and the other which is considered safe just as an ugly friend so the other one looks better. Genuinely, in our case, we only present two directions when we are confused. The first direction is to come up with an idea for which we are genuinely excited about and then to be bad at coming up with a safe route,” he added.

That being said, the agency which looks up to Uncommon London, an ad agency known for making a dent with unconventional ideas, Talented.Agency in India has surely managed to hit the right spot with the Indian diaspora both through its ad campaigns and non-typical ad placements.

Expressing their views in a free-wheeling chat with BestMediaInfo.com, the co-founders of Talented.Agency emphasised that, unlike the typical approach of creating a piece of work and letting it rest once it is rolled out in the public, the creative boutique wants the world to see more and more of its work. Therefore, there is a conscious effort to see how their work can be made more shareable as that’s precisely needed in today's media landscape.

“The New Thing, our second company, has gone a long way in helping us achieve shareability more sharply,” opined Reghunath.

Aditiya highlighted that having founded Talented with a business and creative background, it was in 2023 that the agency began to include a formalised strategy and planning discipline. Therefore, a lot of the work which came out of the agency recently, be it for John Jacobs, Urban Company or others, had a very influential role in adding to Talented’s own sense of how to look at good work.

“Until this year, planning was done between the creative teams and the business teams. But there was room for improvement and that is precisely why we decided to formalise it,” he said.

Upon being questioned as to how different it feels for the duo to have made the agency’s debut at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this year after one of their campaigns while they were in Dentsu won big in the 2022 edition of the coveted gala.

Reghunath replied that it just feels like day one to them and that too with a complete attitudinal shift because today, the biggest difference for them is that they are no longer bound or protected by the safety of the Network when representing their young and independent brand on stage.

“Typically, the network’s work tends to get seen in the advertising and jury circles a lot quicker and easier because it's spread across countries. For us, nobody has heard of our brand outside of India yet. We have international ambitions as a company and therefore, it is a ladder that we have to climb for ourselves. But having said that, the novelty of the early days was very real for us this time at Cannes and I think we did a good job of putting our work out there,” he said.

Going independent after being associated with the network agency for quite some time, the Talented co-founders are quite comfortable in taking on projects because they no longer have to take into consideration the network imposed general pressures of adding retainer businesses and others to its scheme of work.

“If there's a fantastic project, then we just have to get in and figure it out and then get out in a couple of months. We're very comfortable with that. A lot of this mindset shift has got to do with how we're organised internally- flexible teams and creatives with a mindset of coming in and solving one problem very sharply and then exiting immediately after. Not all companies are organised in that way and therefore, we might have a unique advantage from that perspective of taking on projects and smashing them better than the others,” Reghunath opined.

Mind you, the crux of the matter is not that Talented doesn’t take on retainers, they do, but the philosophy of the agency that has been profitable since its early days is that retainers and projects are just two different financial models and the agency’s creative time and efforts remain the same.

To this, the Talented CCO added that the best case scenario is such where even the internal team working on the brand doesn’t get to know whether the work is being done on retainer or project!

“The actual truth that we've discovered on the floor is that creative people want to focus on multiple problems interestingly and this is precisely what had directly influenced our decision on project and retainer work right in the beginning of our inception. Today when we interview people who are willing to join us and ask them why they want to leave their current job, the most common answer that we hear is that creative people feel bored when they’re stuck with working on one client for years when all they want is just to explode their creativity on multiple brands and places,” Regunath added.

Moreover, Aditiya also pointed out that what’s most important to Talented is not the idea but its execution because an idea may look wonderful in a presentation deck but not so much in the actual execution. Hence, the Talented approach to looking at creative work is that if an idea feels like a 6 on 10 in one’s head, the execution has to be an 11 on 10 for it to make sense.

“We are comfortable taking things which look alright on paper, but the magic of it can happen right until the editing stage, dubbing or just before the final product comes out,” he said.

Commenting on why the agency has stuck on to taking things slow which essentially includes being mindful as well at the same time, Aditiya emphasised that a lot of it has to do with Talented being a good client to its external partners as well and the fact that the agency depends on its external partners comprising production houses, animation studios, game designers, tech developers, etc. way more than Mondelez depends on Ogilvy!

And basis the reputation that Talented shares with its external partners, he said that the latter is also happy to do comparatively more heavy lifting than they generally would in a mediocre agency- production house partnership, so to speak.

“Sometimes the stars of a project that Talented is a part of are not from Talented, but the director or the person who has figured the music for an ad! The New Thing is even more reliant on this model than we are because collaboration is a mandate within its team and finding the right person, creator, company and others to work on something with is a natural part of their creative process,” he added.

Upon being questioned on how Talented.Agency’s fee has increased in the past two years and how promising the next year looks to the co-founders, Reghunath replied that because creativity is rare, it is expensive and that being said, good creative people deserve to be highly paid.

Adding on to this, Aditiya said, “Even the most expensive version of a creative agency is cheaper than what a brand will be spending on one or two billboards! If you come to think of it, in a peak efficiency media landscape where creativity is said to be a true differentiator, what should be the worth of the best creativity? It should be worth everything! And those are the rules that we're going to be playing by whilst we maintain our creative standard by upping the work and producing work that people are truly fascinated and interested to consume rather than interruptive ads.”

Moving ahead in the interview, Aditiya stated that when it comes to physical media spaces, there are not enough amazing impact media pieces in India like the ones that are globally- be it at Times Square New York or even at The Sphere in Las Vegas.

“The beauty about Times Square is that it's a melting pot of the entire city and the holder of some of the most premium advertising spots across the globe. It has managed to create a cultural identity for itself where advertising is just a part of the experience and doesn’t take away from what it's like to be at Times Square. Similarly, The Sphere in Las Vegas is also like one full dome kind of building that gives a 360-degree billboard experience if you stand on the 10th or 11th floor. But where is such a property in India? The closest we can come to is the seven-cluster billboard between SV Road and Linking Road in Bombay’s Bandra signal. So I don't feel inspired by the media properties that we have currently,” he said.

Having said that, the general imagination of the media industry in India is not even going towards that area, in his opinion, which is why the agency creatively responded to this lack of genuine creatively exciting media placements by coming up with the concept of inventing its media, case in point being Myntra’s Press Ad.

“I think we're always going to be on the search for that because every new media touchpoint is a creative idea. It may feel like an idea the first time you do it before it feels like a real media property. I'm not generally too bullish on the way more mature markets like America and Europe function, but, indeed, our general advertising media infrastructure in India is not creatively inspiring,” he said.

Concludingly, the Talented CEO also propounded that while there's a market for the kind of work that the agency has been producing there doesn't seem to be a dearth of people who want to do unconventional creative work today, therefore going forward, the same is only going to increase.

“Today, the ad world in India has reached deep media efficiency wherein every media agency is going to come up with a similar strategy for media placements because there’s limited room to innovate within that and hence the only thing that will differentiate your brand from another is the creativity layer on top. It is creativity that is going to be both the cake and the cherry and that just makes us more optimistic,” he said.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com