He spent 13 years at BBH, from Brand Partner to Managing Director of BBH India. Then Arvind Krishnan traded the comfort of a global network for Manja, a 16-person independent agency named after the glass-coated kite string built to cut through.

In Episode 36 of The Indian AdGeek, the founder & CEO of Manja talks about the business of building an agency:

📺 Why you pay for 20 years of experience, not 30 minutes of typing: The mechanics of value-based pricing over FTE headcount.

📺 Operating a 16-person "players-only" agency without bloated middle management or redundant approval layers.

📺 How BBH insulated its creative culture after the Publicis acquisition, & what London understood about work that moves products.

📺 Pitching strategy & post-pitch debriefs: Why spending time defining the real problem beats jumping straight to creative answers.

📺 The "Fuck It, Move On" mindset when losing pitches and why ruminating destroys agency momentum.

📺 Pitching disruptive work (like Urban Company's "Filter Toh Pagal Hai") to risk-averse clients without hard-selling.

📺 The future of Indian indies: Will tech giants like TCS or Wipro eventually acquire creative agencies the way Accenture bought Droga5?

📺 Why agency equity isn't about revenue or headcount, but about creating giants and leaving a lasting cultural imprint.

www.TheIndianGeek.com

Vishal on X - https://x.com/vishal1mehra

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vishal1mehra/

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishal1mehra/

The Indian AdGeek streams on all podcast apps.

#IndianAdGeek #Manja #AdvertisingPodcast #ArvindKrishnan #IndianAdvertising #BBH #AgencyLife

Marketing has one job: create memory. Everything else - the channel, the format, the algorithm, is just the delivery mechanism. That's the argument Shubhranshu Singh makes in this episode of The Indian AdGeek.

Shubhranshu has built brands across categories most marketers only get to touch once in a career - Hindustan Unilever, Star Sports (where his team created Mauka-Mauka), Royal Enfield, and Tata Motors Commercial Vehicles. He's a Global Board Member at the Effie LIONS Foundation, a Global Fellow at The Marketing Academy London, sits on SEBI's Apex & Executive Committee, and writes some of the sharpest columns in Indian marketing today.

In Episode 35 of The Indian AdGeek, Vishal Mehra discusses with him why most modern marketing is "karaoke marketing" - singing someone else's hit song and calling it a strategy; the "-er positioning" trap that quietly killed a generation of differentiation claims; whether the CMO is turning into an endangered species inside Indian boardrooms; what PepsiCo's no-pitch move to Publicis and Publicis dropping the Coca-Cola review as a result, actually signal about the future of agency holding companies; why he thinks clients should stop buying agency time and start buying outcomes.

www.TheIndianGeek.com

Vishal on X - https://x.com/vishal1mehra

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vishal1mehra/

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishal1mehra/

The Indian AdGeek streams on all podcast apps.

Why does Indian advertising keep agreeing that its agency business model is broken and then keep behaving exactly the same way?

In Episode 34 of The Indian AdGeek, Vishal Mehra turns the questions on Prasad Sangameshwaran, Editor of ET Brand Equity, for a wide-ranging conversation about the economics, power structures and future of Indian advertising.

Prasad discusses why agencies have underpriced themselves, how procurement has changed the agency-client relationship, why the industry failed to make pitch fees stick, what the decline of the traditional AOR model means for brands, and why independent agencies increasingly have an advantage over large networks.

The conversation also goes inside advertising trade media: editorial independence, the economics of industry events, whether Cannes Lions still delivers enough value, how AI is changing publishing and discovery, the rise of micro-dramas, and where long-form storytelling could go next.

And perhaps the biggest question of all: if advertising is brilliant at repositioning brands, why has it done such a poor job of positioning its own value?

A candid look at Indian advertising from someone who has spent decades watching, questioning and documenting the industry from the front row.

The Indian AdGeek streams on all podcast apps.

Vishal Mehra - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@vis⁠hal1mehra⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠