Punt Creative’s President, Sumera Dewan, and Rohan Naterwalla, Senior Creative Director and Founding Member, speak to BestMediaInfo.com about what went behind the scenes for the origin of Punt Creative, the impact of Sidharth Rao’s demise on Punt, the tag of an all-member ex-Webchutney team, the culture they want to foster, and much more
Having established one of India’s most celebrated digital agencies, Webchutney, in 1999, which later went on to become a part of the Dentsu Network in 2013, Sidharth Rao joined hands with Madhu Sudhan for the launch of Punt Partners in September, last year.
Led by the man (Rao), who was great at realising the potential or talent within an individual, even when they themselves couldn’t see or believe in their own brazen selves, it was only a matter of time before team Punt started brimming with professionals from the erstwhile Webchutney.
At the time of the launch, the two co-founders, as per Sumera Dewan, President, Punt Creative, were clear that the company would specialise in marketing technology, but as conversations evolved and the premise of what Punt-ers refer to as the Founder’s Circle kicked in, they soon found themselves building the agency in a way that the founding team would ultimately spearhead different aspects of Punt.
The experience of working with Webchutney for Dewan and a lot of other Punt members is both close and sacred, as it is where most of their careers accelerated. In fact, the sole tag of being an ex-Webchutney in itself is good enough to not only attract people’s attention but also to get them to actually listen.
Having constituted a team that has the experience of working with various networks and therefore the knowledge of the pros and cons of the same, it was a cumulative notion that the team decided to build an independent network. The goal was to do things differently in times when the entire spiel around integration has become quite flawed owing to the fact that every division in a network usually goes after their own personal agendas, she said.
Additionally, what also percolated down to Punt along with all the good things Webchutney, in her views, was the (good and motivating) pressure to make the new venture both bigger and better, as all of them do carry the weight of the erstwhile digital agency with them.
Commenting on what led to the germination of the creative boutique under the umbrella of Punt Partners this year, she stated, “The motivation has been two-pronged. Coming from Webchutney, we’re all absolutely in love with the business of advertising. Just the legacy of Webchutney and having Sid as the founder of Punt Partners, it seemed a bit strange and odd for us if we didn’t do creative services.”
Moving forward, Rohan Naterwalla, Senior Creative Director and Founding Member, Punt Creative, also drew attention to the fact that, along with the heritage of Webchutney, the team’s literal DNA comes from one of the Punt founders who started a digital marketing company when computers didn’t even exist in houses and the Jio Revolution of widespread internet penetration hadn’t even started out.
“There was an internet company that was started in 1999, and over the years, the same agency became the Global Agency of the Year at Cannes, eventually,” he pointed out.
On a slightly personal note, Dewan also shared that from the excitement with which she had started her advertising career 13 years ago at JWT, working on Airtel and just proofreading artworks, to 2022, when she was finishing six years at Webchutney, the sense of fulfilment had started waning for her.
One of the things that was deeply discomforting her was the fact that a lot of work was being applauded and tagged as a great piece of work only because it travelled and got people talking about it or the work gaining the necessary eyeballs.
“Very rarely do we all pause to think about the brief, the KPIs, or even the business objectives that we started with and whether or not our creative stack really meets them. At the end of the day, as an industry, we’re constantly feeling demotivated and demoralised that creative budgets are dwindling and people are spending less and less, but the idea really is that if a marketer is expected to invest, then they’re also expected to see tangible business outcomes,” she opined.
Furthermore, she also expressed that with marketing teams getting leaner incrementally along with the sharing of marketing budgets between the CTOs and CMOs, what marketers look for today is not to work with multiple agencies for creatives, performance, etc. owing to factors such as loss of information in translation, extremely fragmented inputs, etc.
And that’s precisely what stuck with the Punt-ers—the idea of doing everything in the martech or creative space in an outcome-led fashion—and led them to start a creative agency in a technology firm.
“We will use technology to enable us to own the metric, deliver on the metric, and commit to owning the metric. I think it’s a big and tall claim that everybody talks about, but very few actually see it through,” Dewan emphasised.
Despite the fact that the announcement of the creative arm of Punt Partners was scheduled a week prior to Rao’s untimely demise, and therefore, the creative arm came into being in June this year, the fundamentals were set quite right by Rao, which is why the agency still stuck to the plan of onboarding the right kind of talent or clients as partners as well as the creative ambition remaining intact even in the aftermath of losing one of their very own.
“When he passed away, there was so much conjecture around whether we’d continue, scale down, or even reimagine our offerings, etc. But for the last five months, our co-founders ensured that nobody flinched. Talent wanted to stay and make the concept a reality, and early clients in no moment expressed the slightest trace of doubt,” she said.
The fact that Rao passed away on a Friday and the Punt-ers were on the ground, shooting their first campaign on Monday, in itself is a testament to the same because the idea was always that he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way either.
“We’re very much committed to doing this and making it as big as possible, as there’s no limit to where we can take it. Also, we have a very strong founder network and investor community that is backing us,” she said.
To this, Naterwalla also added that this is the heritage of the Punt team and the DNA that Rao has passed on to them years and years ago, without even one of them realising the transfer, as it just happened in a way that there is a group of people who feel similarly or equally passionate about it, and it all usually stems from Rao.
Being a strategist who went on to take on a business role later in her career, the whole creative effectiveness piece, for Dewan, stems from the fact that an idea could be a great creative idea, but if it hasn’t done anything for the client’s business in terms of moving the needle, it will only be an idea that the agency built for itself and the marketing and advertising fraternity to applaud.
Much being said Punt completed its first fundraise last year, in December, and the agency as of now, in her viewpoint, is not only at a comfortable spot but has successfully hit profitability last month because the company follows the agency model, which by default is a cash flow business.
In fact, in just a matter of a little over four months, Punt Creative has already bagged the mandate of eight clients, which encompasses five retainers and three projects. Also, with an 18-member team, the agency aims to expand it to about 25 professionals by the end of March 2024.
Throwing light on how the Punt-ers approach clients while pitching, the President said that the agency follows a two-pronged approach because Punt is really focused on upskilling and cross-skilling its talent across both the creative team and the performance marketing team, and while either of them is no expert in both domains, there’s an evolutionary journey that they’re all willing to take.
“While the recent mandate that we won for Keya is an integrated mandate, there are certain clients that come to us specifically for, say, performance marketing or come to the creative unit for creative as well,” she clarified.
In her view, one of the values that the current co-founders, Sudhan and Priyanka Agarwal, have reinforced in the team is the understanding that it’s great if both of Punt’s teams can work with each other with great chemistry, but it’s also perfectly fine if the two teams have to partner with other agencies that extend beyond their umbrella, because at the end of the day, at no point should there be disservice to the client.
“Punt has invested significantly in getting the right people on board to navigate us through the times, so when it is integrated, it does help massively. For example, we have a dedicated team for immersive tech, generative AI, etc., and none of them actually work in silos, unlike networks, where the larger network has no idea what they are doing and vice versa. In fact, our jam sessions include stakeholders from all our teams, albeit from strategy, account management, media, immersive tech, AI, or even creative,” Naterwalla elaborated.
“Today, the advertising industry has become a place where there are more armchair agency heads than there are actual creative people. Therefore, when the team of 18 co-conspirators tries to figure out what a better agency setup looks like, we may come up with different answers every single day. But because we’re lean and just starting off, the beauty of it all is that tomorrow they won’t exist,” he chuckled.
In addition, Dewan also highlighted that what the duo is trying to do is provide their team with a safe space, a platform to make mistakes and learn from them, to really evolve and be self-disciplined, and to experiment and do things differently, just as they were fortunate enough to do the same in their past workplaces.
Some of the things that Punt Creative has been trying to do differently in the past four months, as per Naterwalla, include allowing the team to set their goals on which they will be evaluated by themselves so that the leadership can help them tangibly realise the same; the core team being credited for the work rather than just the CCO; taking care of the jadedness that people feel coming from different experience levels; a three-day office work week schedule and trust-based leave policy; and re-hiring talent year on year, even if it means a 10%, 30%, or even 50% increment in addition to upskilling them.
On a concluding note, he colloquially shared that Punt Creative’s vision for scalability is similar to that of the viral PayPal Mafia’s picture, which frames all the people who worked at the company at one point and later went on to become the bigwigs of Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk.
Dewan also said, “There’s this extreme sexiness and might in being able to say that we will own the metric for you and that by default requires a lot of gumption, but the way we have started and are building our relationships, I’m confident that clients will see us more and more as creative solution providers to their business problems. But in the process, we will also have our fun; we will win awards and also do some sexy and flashy work because, without these, there’s no fun in being a part of a creative agency.”
