Agency Feature: Graffiti Collaborative

Who is Graffiti Collaborative?

Graffiti Collaborative is a full-service creative agency. It was founded 8 years ago by Shweta Thakur, an XLRI Jamshedpur alumni and Shinoy Thomas, alumni of Symbiosis Pune.

We solve business challenges by using creative communication to address the problem. We are medium agnostic and produce communication through design, digital, content, and production. In the last 8 years, we have developed competencies across different verticals. We do not believe in specializing in anyone since in today’s world of integrated marketing and communication, multidisciplinary skills are mandatory to understand the production and distribution of content.

Our result-oriented, creative nucleus arises from structured processes that contribute to faster turn-around-times; the complete ownership of the brands we work with which means our ideas have conviction; and a strong technology orientation which ensures that new technologies are integrated effectively into existing communication channels.

We assure creative exclusivity to our clients by only working with one client per sector. Not only does this avoid creative conflicts, but it also benefits clients by bringing our wide creative expertise across industries to bear on fresh, creative insights for the brand and sector.

We are a growing team of 16 young, passionate, quirky people and
four loving, eccentric dogs! The
values that we are trying to inculcate among the team also resonate with us
individually.

What's in the name?

"Graffiti' is a unique and powerful form of artistic expression with a sense of purpose - often used to create awareness or make a statement. Our name is rooted in this understanding of the power that communication has to create impact and the responsibility that comes with it. Graffiti is also colorful, and while it seemingly doesn’t have a form or structure, there is always a method to the madness. 

We are 'Collaborative' because
we believe the future needs people with different skills and experiences to
come together to create - not compete.

What we do?

Graffiti Collaborative is a result-oriented, full service 360-degree creative agency.  We offer the following key services across design, digital, content, and production:

Each of these offerings can be taken as off-the-shelf individual services by organizations or taken as combined service offerings, namely Customer Engagement, Digital Communication, Internal Communication, Employer Branding, Experience Design, Corporate Communication, Brand Strategy, and 360° communication strategy.

We also offer customized solutions for business challenges.

Why we do it?

We are a purpose-driven agency and believe in the immense power of communication to create impact. With great power comes great responsibility. We want to use this power to put some love, positivity, and magic out there. Trust us, the world needs it.

How we evolve?

We have a strong culture of learning, unlearning and relearning throughout the organization. This means that we do not offer off-the-cuff bold ideas unless they are backed by research insights. On a continuous basis, we let go of things that are no longer relevant - information, trends, strategies and so on. We read and share articles within the team. Our clients help us grow immensely with their feedback. The team is young, very plugged in and passionate - so there is a substantial amount of learning from each other. One of our values is ‘embrace change’. This essentially means that we do not judge a new situation as good or bad; we adapt to it and find the best way to make it work. The dots always connect in retrospect.

Also Read: Agency Feature: SocioPool

Social responsibility in
social media

We believe in communicating with a conscience. Social media channels form a part of it. We do not get into conversations if we have no value to add. We do our research before stepping into conversations. We have to be sensitive to the conversations we participate in. Our tonality for brands has to be responsible - so as not to be unkind to any community. We have to apologize when we are in the wrong. It is just a growing list of things to do. We hope that not just at an agency level, but even at an individual level, people become responsible for the information they share.

The need of the hour

This is a catch22 situation. There is the real danger of creating rumors and widespread panic if social media is not regulated. However, there is the element of curbing individual voices if it is over-regulated.

Finding a balance in this is always going to draw opposition from some side but it needs to be done. We could look at having guidelines of how brands need to behave at times of crises, any big news, disasters, etc. We could also look at making age-appropriate content which should be made available to younger audiences given that currently, they have access to everything

We learned the hard way

1. Find a balance between personal and professional space at work. 
2. Clients are not all trying to make your life miserable
3. Speaking to a client and airing the differences is a better solution than not taking their calls
4. Freelancers are not reliable! In any case, we haven’t found the right ones!
5. Hiring the appropriate mix of people with the right attitude is critical

Did we just share that?

We have a tradition to celebrate the Graffiti Collaborative founding anniversary each year with a team offsite for a couple of days. Our work is always organized around this team break. Back in the day when we were relaunching Britannia Good Day on digital, one of the campaign dates was shuffled and the date to go live coincided with our 5th year anniversary when the entire team was going to be in Goa! Although all the work was rolled out in advance, there were last-minute changes to be done. Being in Goa did not stop the team from working on the account! We will never forget that anniversary trip - we worked on the beach, at the bar and even did con-calls on the way to an island on a boat!

They work with us



Some of our key clients
across industries include:

Industry as we foresee

We believe that the future is creative + technology supported by effective communication. We foresee numerous technological innovations happening across the industry. We will be exposed to new content formats and channels of communication as VR, AR, holograms, projections and newer technologies will become integrated with social channels. There will be a lot more micro-level data on people for targeting. There will be regulations that will come into play - for brands and individuals.

A day without Internet

We love going
tactile in our creative approach - create things from scratch. Whiteboards and
brainstorms bring out the best in us. So a day without the internet would have
us cracking on all available briefs. It would mean a day of high productivity
as the creative team would not have any distractions for getting things done.

Lastly, are you hiring?

Yes, we are hiring people for the business and digital teams. Smart cookies are welcome to write to us on our website.