The universally accepted way to look back at the year gone by would be to stack what one had planned to achieve at the onset, and compare it with where one has landed, a year down the line.
Funnily, a lot of what Flibbr® has achieved, has been by the way. A sort of a side-effect of being focused on our primary goal of making a tangible difference to a marketer/brand’s business challenge. I did write about this in an earlier post, but for now let us take a dispassionate look at our journey this far.
The Victories:
We have had the privilege of working with businesses that command a global footprint. Clients such as TAFE and PepsiCo India. We have delivered smaller projects for clients in the SaaS industry and contraceptives industry. We have an on-going project with Leanworx, a client with immense growth potential in the machine monitoring systems industry. We recently signed up a project with one of India’s most trusted corporate brands. The most important thing – every business that came our way, came without any outreach. We never had to solicit business. I believe this is, in some way, a validation of our belief that when it comes to tackling serious business challenges, there are enough clients out there who would like to work with seasoned professionals and will seek you out.
The Discoveries
One of heartening discoveries in our short journey has been finding a veritable goldmine of experienced and diverse talent that is happy to work independently and even happier to collaborate. Some of these fine minds are now outside of the traditional corporate structure for various reasons. From design thinking to business strategy to UI/UX to students of culture, we meet more such people every week. This strengthens our belief that no single traditionally structured organisation can provide this potent coming together of diverse and experienced skills to a client. I will not write off the industry that has put food on my table for more than two decades, but the advertising industry truly does not realise what it is missing.
Bittersweet Learnings
Flibbr® does not ‘pitch’. Neither do we discount. One of the side effects of sticking to our guns is a incoming client disappearing the moment they receive our cost proposal. There are many clients out there who continue to believe they already know the answer to their business problem. So all they are looking for is a ‘logo’ – without considering the thinking behind it or realizing the value a design change can potentially create, or simply a ‘film’ or a ‘website,’ or for that matter a ‘campaign.’
That’s one part of it.
The other is, being accustomed to discounting with even larger communication groups, clients expect it. I assume this is something we will continue to encounter as we go ahead. It will either take wiser clients or the industry to charge a fee commensurate with the value it brings to the table, to solve this problem.
‘Along The Way’ Accolades
We have our client partners, who pushed us, to thank for this. Some of the work we put out last year has been recognised in India and abroad. Closer home, our work for Mountain Dew (PepsiCo India) picked up awards at the ABBY One Club Awards, Marketers’ Excellence Awards and Campaign India Digital Crest Awards. We won in multiple categories, ranging from Digital to Experiential to Online Video to Film. We even scored in the Integrated category.
Globally, in what we believe is a good validation of the work we believe in doing, the WARC Awards for Effectiveness Global 2023 recently recognised our work as one of the most impactful done anywhere in the world. WARC, undeniably, commands tremendous respect across the world. So this win, in particular, is sweet.
What Next?
Flibbr® will focus on three things this year.
One: formalise the key learnings of year one and continue to remain true to our core belief – that clients seek value and solutions. And that there are enough out there who seek experienced, talented allies in their business battles.
Two: gather more like-minded, experienced souls committed to doing solid, breakthrough work and bring them into the Flibbr® ecosystem.
Three: scale our delivery system. So we can help more clients from diverse categories with solid thinking and impactful execution.
When you start-up after having spent more than two decades in an industry, you don’t seek validation from your peers. The validation you seek the most is from your own self. In that, I do believe, my comrade-in-arms GS Hari Ganesh and I have got ample amounts of it in our very first year of existence.
It’s time, now, to move forward.
