Reinventing itself - ICOMO Start(s)-up again

New brands on the make, looking to scale up quickly set up a scorching pace with demands that can often be inconsistent with traditional marketing knowledge.

One of the agencies which has grabbed attention is ICOMO, with its path breaking work on Faasos - the new age food technology company, unknown just about 4 to 5 years back. With lines like 'Sometimes coming quickly... is a good thing' (for quick delivery) and 'Damn the Faasos App' (for its app launch), Faasos' high recall branding has helped it through 3 rounds of funding and scale up now to 10 cities.

"We had no choice but to be disruptive when it came to Faasos - the QSR space is highly crowded. Humour has high risk - no one likes a bad joke. Challenge is to take it across all media, especially Digital, and still be fresh" says Mitchelle D'Souza, Strategy and Creative Supervisor, ICOMO.

"ICOMO has been the co-creator of brand Faasos. They put the team's vision on paper, signage, advertisement, social media and everything else out there. Over time, they became part of the team, did not require specific briefs, understood unsaid things, came up with ideas on their own, laughed at or coined the same jokes, pushed back when required. If you are looking for an agency that can convert your vision into design and communication with the same passion as your own team would display, then there is no one better than ICOMO." Says Jaydeep Barman, Co- Founder and CEO, Faasos.

Unlike a lot of traditional agencies, ICOMO also now designs and plans the User Interface for mobile applications, not just the look and feel, but also the back-end technology. It has its share of traditional clients (Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, British Council), but is quickly adding new age start-ups with fresh new ideas like Pescafresh, Belita apart from doing projects for Grabhouse and Taskbob. Started 14 years back and led by Sandeep Varma, who was also the director writer of the highly acclaimed movie 'Manjunath', ICOMO claims it is approached by around 3 to 4 start-ups a month for branding work.

"Start-ups have a lot of difficulties, and you can't behave like an outsider. They also have investors who bring with them with own networks and tie-ups often with other agencies. So we need to control our possessive instinct. For eg, we don't do all of Faasos' work, but most of it, and we'd like to believe certainly the better work. But for all these difficulties, I feel our team really comes alive working with these start-ups. Meeting these exciting entrepreneurs, with their big plans and dreams really invigorates. Jaydeep, for example, is brilliant and instinctive, so are many of the others we work with" says Sandeep.

The other aspect that stands out about ICOMO expertise is filmmaking for these startups. Probably arising from Sandeep's own background as an acclaimed filmmaker, ICOMO started the use of illustrated animatics for films for social media. Till now, agencies and brands have been using social media films as a cheaper way to launch TVC lookalikes. However, social media films have a limited shelf life and for brands to do many, they would need big budgets to allow for expensive cost of production which live action shoots bring. And start-ups are typically cash starved, especially in initial rounds of funding. Yet they know original video content works, and is often the best way to explain their brand proposition. ICOMO has a team of illustrators now, and does almost 50 illustrated films for Radio Mirchi, one of its marquee clients. Recently, when Faasos launched radio spots, and did not want to spend extensive media money on buying more spots, the spots got a fresh life of social media by ICOMO's visualising the radio spots via illustrations making them funnier and catchier.

"Illustrative animatics is comparatively inexpensive, have quick turnaround time, and depend more on ideas than technique. It's anyway not going to be seen beyond a few days, so we felt unjustified to ask clients to spend a lot of money on live action shoots, though we would love it if they do :)" says Sandeep.

An estimated 800+ starts ups are being added every year. Sweeping tech changes, massive internet and smartphone penetration has also been silently changing the landscape for advertising agencies. Just as people expect a shake out of start-ups at some stage, we may be looking at one for agencies at some time in future. Relevance is going to be the key.