Mumbai: After a combined 20 years at Dentsu Webchutney, Gautam Reghunath and PG Aditiya set to explore their entrepreneurial sides with the launch of their new project, Talented. As the name suggests, the duo has centred their venture around what they believe has to be the most valued currency in the industry – its talent. The new founders also say that they have few radical ideas they believe can fundamentally alter the agency business – including employee ownership and stronger skin in the game relationships with clients.
On their new start, Gautam Reghunath & PG Aditiya said,“We love the agency business. But the world certainly doesn’t need another advertising agency. What we believe it does need is a serious re-imagination of the agency experience – both for clients and for the talent in advertising. With Talented, we’re starting-up because we have some ideas that we believe can fundamentally alter what our business means, first for those working in it and then therefore for our clients.
We want to build a workplace where what every member of the leadership & its youngest colleagues think and say about the company, are the exact same. Where our actions and policies back up our words and press releases. Our hope is to create an ambitious, world-class, creative company with a big heart – addressing age-old advertising tropes like pay, work-hours, inequity, lack of employee ownership, lack of ESOPs and our industry’s looming irrelevance while at it. We all know perfectly well what needs to improve in the agency business: we just plan to execute it to perfection. There’s so much we can learn from our friends in tech.
Now, why should all this matter to our clients? Well, it’s only natural that the benefits of all of this will flow directly into our work for them. When a client chooses us, we want them to know that we’re committed to putting the sharpest, most motivated talent in front of them. How we operate internally is going to play a huge role in making that happen. And at the end of all of this, we just want to do great advertising.”
Gautam & PG Aditiya were both homegrown leaders at dentsu webchutney having started out in 2010 and 2012 respectively. Under their leadership, Webchutney rose to become the most awarded Indian creative agency over the last three years. The agency’s showreel over the last few years feature campaigns like the Unfiltered History Tour with Vice, Swiggy’s Voice of Hunger and Flipkart’s Hagglebot.