Independent homegrown advertising firm Rediffusion announced the launch of NEXT by Rediffusion on 15 August. Focused on building advertising solutions for new age companies, the agency will be headquartered in Mumbai, and will over the next 18 months expand to Delhi and Bengaluru.
The company said that the announcement on a chief executive will be made later this month.
In an exclusive interview with Storyboard18, Dr. Sandeep Goyal, managing director of Rediffusion talks about what makes the new agency different, building the team and why Rediffusion is not in the network play.
Edited excerpts.
How will NEXT by Rediffusion be different from other new shops?
The target audience for the agency itself is different – we are going to be talking to new-age companies – companies that define this techade. These will be start-ups, soonicorns and unicorns in edtech, eHealth, fintech, e-sports, and more such domains that are driven by younger consumers and new technologies.
How big is the team and where have you hired people from?
The team is still coming together. The CEO has been identified. He will be on board very soon. Interestingly, we have planned on on-boarding talent with post grad degrees in sociology, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. Also English Literature and Hindi Literature. The HR team is also in touch with a few IIT-ians to be our coders and data scientists. All of these are folks who normally you don’t meet in ad agencies.
What’s the long term strategy at Rediffusion and the new agency? Is it a network play?
No network play – we have no such ambitions or illusions! This is just a very sharply focused agency targeting a market that needs different talents, different perspectives. We believe a lot of the new-age companies are very tech-driven as most have engineers at the controls.
What they increasingly need, as businesses balloon in size, are market accelerating ideas that will bring in more consumers quicker and in larger numbers. ” – Sandeep Goyal
Most domains are new. Hence, no past best practices exist, NEXT by Rediffusion will operate within this well defined domain.
What kind of unique solutions NEXT is expected to deliver to its clients?
To early to say. But we will have coders sitting alongside copywriters. That says it all.