We need to find the audacity to iterate, re-iterate or shut things down and rebuild
Gautam Reghunath – CEO, Dentsu Webchutney
Double Down on Creativity as Webchutney’s Competitive Advantage
The truth is that over the last decade, creativity-that-works has taken back seat at most big agencies. Creativity as an agency-incubated product is now rarer than ever. In our industry right now, media distribution, productivity & efficiency are what are valued, but the side-effects are that they are all becoming commoditized. There’s little differentiation. As an agency riding the internet wave, it is only smart for us to maintain our focus of differentiation to creativity, a truly scarce resource whose value is always on the rise. From my perspective, when a client chooses Dentsu Webchutney, I know that we are committed to putting the smartest & most creative people in the room for them. That will continue to be what our business model hinges on.
More Compassion & Making Kindness Default in Our Creative Pursuit
Real creative process is messy. It is painful. There is rejection. There is burn-out. There is self-doubt. There are headaches. There is tiredness, sadness and sometimes loneliness. There is more rejection and maybe hopefully, somewhere in between all of that, there is a moment of magic. Maybe just one single moment. A priceless moment. More compassion is healthy for creativity and will continue to be a north star. This is critical to us scaling in the next year and breaking yet another agency trope.
Faster, Better Decision Making as an Agency Virtue
We have so much more to learn as an industry on how to re-invent ourselves. Over 2021, we hope to be less scared of killing things. That’s what kept us alive over the last 21 years. We need to find the audacity to iterate, re-iterate or shut things down and rebuild. Nobody ever regrets making fast and decisive adjustments to changing circumstances. I’m thoroughly inspired by our people who built processes from scratch, virtuallythat have redefined what & how it means to work at Dentsu Webchutney. Accelerated and better decision making has a cascading effect on the entire agency, and I’m looking to enable even more of it next year.
Democratizing Great Creative
Indian advertising has no shortage of great young talent but the platforms for them to shine within our industry are hard to come by. Over the last few years, Webchutney has been able to nurture incredible talent who plays by completely different rules. We’re here to give them the platform, listen to their ideas and just let them be. Through internal hiring systems to support digital-native talent, to powering new initiatives to serve clients in fresh ways that only Dentsu Webchutney can, we will continue on our mission to elevate Indian creativity to a global stage. This is one area I’m most excited by because it’s going to transform our creative product in unexpected ways.
Better Meetings
So, this one’s personal. Anybody who’s worked with me knows that it takes serious effort to get me to agree to a meeting. Sorry, team! My grouse with meetings are many but I can narrow it down to this funniest and yet realest take I’ve ever read on meetings from Jason Fried: that ‘meetings procreate’. How often have we had one meeting tending to lead to another meeting the next day, which leads to you continuing to have to attend meetings around the same topic for weeks at a stretch? The agency business hides our unnecessary obsession with meetings under the guise of our work depending on ‘collaboration’. Meetings are not the service. Creative work is. If my team spends less time on meetings and more time on execution, I’ll count that as a consequential agency win in 2021.
