Senior teams, value-based pricing, and stress on fundamentals: Manja co-founders tell their story

The agency's launch in 2022 was part of the recent trend of senior ad folks starting indie creative shops

Arvind Krishnan’s and Prajato Guha Thakurta’s shared résumés at their two-year-old indie creative agency, Manja, include kidnapping cricket legend Kapil Dev for Disney+ Hotstar, bottling a money-scented perfume for Amazon Prime Video, and showing how a Mahindra automobile factory solved the marital woes of men living in Telangana’s Zaheerabad town.

Such eclectic pieces of work are possible because the agency, which celebrated its second anniversary in June 2024, has implemented a model, in which senior people work directly with senior clients to get to the answer quickly.

The model does not discriminate against young agency staff but is more of a response to market demands. “Clients typically come to us after working with a certain type of agency. What they seek from us is very direct involvement from the senior team,” says co-founder Krishnan.

Between the two co-founders, there is over three decades of work experience. Before taking the entrepreneurial plunge, Krishnan was the Managing Director of creative advertising giant BBH and Publicis India. Thakurta, in his nearly two decades of work life, has honed his skills at agencies like Leo Burnett, JWT (now VML), and McCann Worldgroup.

It is striking to note that, following the launch of Manja, the Indian advertising world has seen several mid-to-senior-level ad professionals leave their jobs at networked agencies to launch their own creative shops. Some of these include Fundamental, Talented, TGTHR, Steve Priya, and Curativity.

Krishnan and Thakurta made the move because, like many, they wanted to do good work and ensure they were hands-on with it, rather than having someone else do it while they watched from a distance. Krishnan looks after the agency’s business, while Thakurta focusses on creative duties.

Talk about starting a trend.

Much like all the new agencies, Manja works with a mix of modern and traditional clients. These include Taco Bell, Ola, TCS, Budweiser, AJIO, Mahindra, Bluestone, Beam Suntory, Amazon Prime, NYKAA, Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar, The Times of India, The Economic Times, ICICI, and Rummy Circle.

The revenue split is 50:50 between retainers and project work at the agency.

Balancing modernity with tradition

Along with its model of hiring only experienced staff, Krishnan says, “A lot of the work we do is modern in its approach, but it's built on very strong fundamental thinking as well.”

A good example of this is the agency’s work for Mahindra Automotive on Kargil Vijay Diwas. They did not rely on the usual nationalistic and emotional tropes agencies employ to thank the country’s armed forces. Instead, they chose humour.

An 80-second ad showed soldiers requesting people to send them “tips on making up with a girlfriend,”, “remedies for hair loss,”, and “show recommendations.” . It portrayed jawans facing the same issues as the aam junta while reminding us to thank them for their service to the nation.

The writing is fresh and works splendidly for an automotive brand that underwent a modernisation phase a few years ago.

The idea or its execution: What’s tougher? Krishnan quotes his “ex-super boss,” John Hegarty, co-founder of BBH, who once said, “Advertising is 80% idea, but also 80% execution.”

However, producing such work takes time, and agencies need to stress the importance of time to a client right from the start.

“It is about making that first push to tell the client, ‘Listen, we will need this kind of time,’ and once the client sees the value and the output, it then becomes a cycle,” says co-founder Thakurta.

The co-founders feel such an approach makes it easier to tell other potential clients what they are buying into when they approach Manja.

Retainers, projects, and pricing

In recent years, there has been a clear increase in project-based work over the traditional retainer model that brands and agencies used to follow. This trend mirrors the country's rise in digital advertising over the past few years.

For Manja, most of its best work has come from project-based work. “Many times, clients have come to us saying, ‘We've gone to ABC and we are not happy with what that agency has done. It doesn't mean Manja is now our agency; ABC is still ours, but would you be open to taking a stab at it?’ So, it’s a fresh brief,” explains Thakurta on how some of the project work comes to the agency.

The first piece of work an agency executes for a client under a project partnership is crucial, as it often leads to further work from the same client.

Along with the types of work contracts agencies sign with clients, the pricing model is also undergoing a gradual change. The traditional model determined rates based on the number of hands an agency deployed to execute a certain amount of work.

“Our pricing has always been value-based rather than input-based with projects. If you've got a scope that looks like ABC, this is the value we think of it. More or less, all our clients are in the same ballpark for us,” states Krishnan.