Stake claim to your work on Kulzy

Never got credit for the work you helped create? Always felt like a behind-the-scenes hand? Join Kulzy.

Do you know the name of the sound engineer who worked on Cadbury's award-winning Shubharambh campaign? Or the set designer who worked on Vodafone's Zoozoo films? How about the casting director of Lifebuoy's famous Gondappa ad?

Here's a fourth question: What if you had access to an online platform on which you could not only find the answers to such questions but also display each and every piece of work you have ever created, or helped create, for a brand?

Enter Kulzy.com, a forum that lets you do just this. Kulzy is a website on which professionals in the communications industry can stake claim to their work. Whether you're from an ad agency, media buying agency, production house or brand team, or whether you work as a freelancer in this industry, on Kulzy, you can create your individual profile, that will reflect each and every piece of communication that you helped create, no matter how big or small your role.

Kulzy went live around the end of last year and is currently in its beta phase. Sandeep Vij, co-founder and director, afaqs!, says, about this new online property, "In our industry, thousands of faceless people are part of creating and building brands, piece by piece. Unfortunately, they remain anonymous. Kulzy enables them to be acknowledged for their contribution."

The film industry, he reminds us, does this through elaborate end-of-film credit sequences in which the efforts of the entire crew are acknowledged. "Some films like Who Killed Roger Rabbit, Kill Bill 2 and Matrix Reloaded, spend 10 whole minutes applauding the team. In our very own Bollywood, Farah Khan's credit sequences are quite comprehensive, not to mention fun," smiles Vij.

The ideology that Kulzy is based on is that any piece of work belongs, in equal measure, to the team that created it and not just to the one name that the work becomes synonymous with, over time. "There are industries where people with varied skills band together to create or execute a project - it could be a piece of music, a television program, a film, an internet site, an advertisement or an event," says Vij. Ours is one such.

"Ogilvy and Piyush (Pandey) may be celebrated for the Fevicol ad. However, there is an army of people that ensured it happened. Kulzy ensures each person in the team is acknowledged and celebrated," he goes on.

Besides individual profiles, Kulzy also has company pages. The page for automobile brand Volkswagen, for instance, will be a collection or archive, if you will, of all the creative work that has ever been created for Volkswagen. This work, in turn, will also reflect on the individual profiles of the people that worked on it and the respective pages of the various communication and media firms that worked on it.

A single piece of work on Kulzy, therefore, will appear on several pages, including network pages as well, that is, pages dedicated to the work that belongs to global media giants like WPP, Dentsu, etc, which are parent companies of many ad/media agencies. Other sections on Kulzy include 'Best of' and 'Awards'.

Interestingly, Kulzy is not just for those who are currently part of the communications fraternity but for ex-employees as well - those who've either switched fields or retired from this one.

And age, of course, is no bar. "The younger audience who is more 'social media alive' can find its way around Kulzy almost immediately," shares Vij, adding nevertheless, "On the Kulzy helpline we get a number of calls from 'seniors' who get their secretaries to help them upload/claim their work." With time, he believes, they'll all be on Kulzy; after all, the motivation to be part of a tribe is a powerful and universal one.

Presently, there are over 50,000 marketing communication companies in India, spread across cities - not just in the top metros but in cities like Jaipur, Coimbatore, Bareilly, Pune, Rajkot, Raipur, Bhubaneswar, too. And these firms are of different types and specialise in various services - they include digital agencies, printing companies, film companies, photography services, advertising agencies, activation agencies and so on.

In all, there are over three million people who are intimately involved in brand-related communications. Kulzy is well on its way to creating a community where each one can showcase relevant work, both at the individual and company level.

Team Kulzy is already overwhelmed by the response from entrepreneurial organisations that are keen to build their individual and organisational pages. At present, there are over 50,000 pieces of work that are already uploaded on Kulzy; the figure is growing exponentially.

By March 2015, Kulzy will have over a hundred thousand registrations with half a million pieces of work that will be archived and bucketed in an easy-to-access, orderly manner. One could search for work by brand, by type of work, by agency, by person or by rating. Say, you're interested in seeing an activation done by Lifebuoy in 2009 and wish to find out more about the team that created and executed it - all it would take to identify and contact the team that churned out that activation would be a few clicks.

Kulzy is for anyone who wishes to be counted. The studio artist who helped finish the art work, the account management guy who wrote the brief, the product manager who briefed the agency, the model who cradled the product and smiled for the camera, the sound engineer, the demonstrator at the event, the make-up artist, the space seller from TOI or Star TV, the voice-over artist, the musicians... everyone.

You know who you are. So come, join Kulzy, stake claim to your work and make sure you get credit for it.

By the way, just in case you're wondering, according to the urban dictionary, 'a Kulzy' is 'the master of the universe', among other things. And take our word for it - being on Kulzy.com can certainly make you feel like one.