ABBY Grand Prix winner Tribes Communication has a bone to pick with ad awards

At the 18th edition of Goafest, integrated marketing agency Tribes Communication emerged as one of the festival's standout performers, securing an impressive haul of one Grand Prix, five Golds, three Silvers, nine Bronzes, and eight Merits across diverse categories. But as per the agency, finding ways into the award categories is the difficult part. 

Tribes Communication, founded in 2015, has spent the better part of a decade carving out a niche in out-of-home (OOH) and experiential advertising. The agency now offers other services such as branding, content, and creative production. However, when it comes to prestigious awards in the industry, Tribes is finding the award categories unaccommodating for the kind of work they produce. 

Speaking to afaqs!, Partho Ghose, CEO of Insync, Tribes, and Arpan Jain, who is the chief creative officer, discuss awards and the challenges of entering as an outdoor agency and business, and their ambitious plans for expansion in an increasingly consolidated industry. 

 Edited excerpts:

Q: How important are awards like the ABBY for agencies like Tribes?

Ghose: Events such as Goafest and the ABBY Awards are more of an aspiration for agencies like us, and they're also an inspiration. If you're looking at other agencies, it becomes your inspiration for doing better. I've been coming here for almost ten years now, and the excitement never dies.

Q: You identify yourself as a 'non-traditional' agency. How does this affect your ability to compete in traditional award categories?

Jain: When I say ‘non-traditional’, I mean the work we do, our bread and butter, is outdoors and experiential, a medium that doesn’t necessarily yield a lot of audiovisual work. So, we struggle with categories when we enter awards because we can't participate in audio, print, or TVCs naturally. 

When case studies are judged, more than ideas, the jury checks the packaging of the film. My team members don't work on TVCs every day, so they don't have the expertise that a TVC professional would have in terms of cinematography and direction. They'll always fall short on the craft of the film versus a mainline agency. But we still go up and win because our ideas are strong.

Q: Tell us about the agency's origins and how it evolved from its early days.

Ghose: The core group has been in the industry for 22 to 25 years now. We worked in various agencies and were part of Mudra as Ignite Mudra. We later acquired the entire stake and became an independent unit, now called Tribes. Our MD, Gour Gupta, is a veteran in the industry for almost 30 years and has created many successful units. 

This young agency's turnaround to the top rank within 10 years is definitely a success story.

Q: Who was your first key client, and how did that shape the agency's trajectory?

Ghose: Our first client was PepsiCo—that's how our journey started with a new brand. Backing such a big brand was a definite confidence builder. Many clients we handle now we've been working with for the last 10-15 years, so we've been able to maintain consistency in terms of deliverables.

Q: What's the current size of the agency in terms of revenue, employees, and geographical presence?

Ghose: It's been a good year for us. We have a team of almost 200 people spread across 15 offices. It's not just metros—out-of-home is all about being present locally in non-metro towns as well.

Q: What makes Tribes different in terms of creative approach, particularly in out-of-home advertising?

Jain: We are the only agency in the country that has the capability and a team dedicated to designing media-native creative for OOH. Currently, across the industry, OOH ads are not really OOH ads—they're basically print ads plastered onto the OOH medium or TVC screengrabs plastered onto billboards. We have the strength and capability to understand the medium and design creatives specifically for it.

Q: How has the creative process evolved to meet changing client expectations?

Ghose: Every campaign now has to work even harder. Initially, if it was an out-of-home campaign, it was just isolated to an out-of-home environment. Now we need to design campaigns with tech integrated into them and social media integrated into them. There's a shelf life about campaigns that extends beyond the original medium. Creative teams have also evolved from traditional formats to digital formats and three-dimensional visualisations of products.

Q: How do you view the current trend of consolidation and acquisitions in the advertising industry?

Ghose: We haven't pursued acquisition as such, but we are now partners or preferential partners with other media agencies such as Omnicom or Havas, where we serve as their out-of-home or BTL (Below The Line) partners. That's how we're navigating the consolidation trend while maintaining our independence.

If we compare ourselves with other creative agencies, we're moving towards the top level. In terms of overall comparison with other BTL agencies, we've definitely moved to the top in the last 10 years. We can easily say we're among the largest OOH and activation agencies in terms of creative capabilities. 

When we come here and see that we're winning golds on the first day itself while competing with major agencies, it gives us motivation and shows we're on the right track.

Q: You're seeing increased competition from digitally native agencies entering the OOH space. How do you respond to this?

Jain: I think we ourselves are a specialised micro-agency—we're just 10 years old as a company. OOH, as a medium, is misunderstood by a lot of people. When you say OOH, people largely consider it as billboards, but the landscape is huge. A direct mail piece that you get at your home is an out-of-home medium.

We've done campaigns for Honda where we utilised existing AC vents as a drying station (the air blown out of AC units was used as a drying station). So, the AC vents became an out-of-home medium. Anything can be an out-of-home medium if you apply creativity to it.

Q: What are your expansion plans and future strategies?

Ghose: We've been working across categories but are pretty heavy on the auto category—Maruti Suzuki, Hyundai Motors, Skoda, and VW. We've just won the pitch for Tata Motors as well.

We're upgrading ourselves to compete as an integrated agency, so we now have a digital wing that's about a year old. We're adding capabilities like sustainability as a unit. These USPs are helping us create an integrated company.