Who the hell are we?

Sid Murlidhar, Group Creative Director

“Agency culture” is an oft-used, oft-misunderstood concept. Is it a truly symbiotic relationship between the agency and the culture? Does the agency define the culture? Or does the culture define the agency? As people come and go, does the culture shift? So many questions and no, there are no right answers.

When it came time for us to try and understand what it is our culture was, it was an opportunity for us to take stock of where we had come as an agency and where we wanted to go as a company. In the span of under 10 years, we had grown from a small family of 60 to a vibrant 170, spread across four floors and two countries. Whatever the culture was that existed a decade ago did not exist today. And that was nobody’s fault. Growth and conversely attrition is a culture killer. People come and go, clients come and go, revenue comes and goes and culture is shaped by all of it. So we had to find something inherent to the bones of this place. Something that was incontrovertible. A defining trait that cannot and will not change regardless of whether we are an agency of one or one thousand. And that one thing was humanity. Not humanity in the traditional sense. But a more fervent sort of humanity. The humanity that arises in times of struggle and that thrives in times of success. The humanity that exists in all of us now and in generations past. A unerring willingness to defend humanity in all its forms. Kindness, empathy, open-mindedness, along with the realization that while the world myopically relies on data, human instinct is still the most powerful tool we have. This is the one commonality, the one DNA string that has existed in all employees current and past. So when it came time to put pen to paper and qualify what it is we are, it was simple. We are now, have always been and will continue to be Defiantly Human.