How Enormous is winning most of its new business without pitching

For Enormous, 2025 marked a defining year. The independent agency not only won Agency of the Year at the ABBY Awards at Goafest, India’s largest creative festival, it also achieved something far rarer in today’s competitive market. Most of its new business came without pitching.

“80% of what we won was won without a pitch,” says Ashish Khazanchi, co-founder and managing partner of the 12-year-old agency.

Those wins included brands such as Bombay Shaving Company, Hero FinCorp, Navneet, Ralco Tyres, 91 Springboard, Veeba, Reliance Consumer Products and Nua Wellness.

The feat was not a one off. In 2024, Enormous added nine clients between March and September without participating in formal pitches and also won the Grand Effie for its work on Jaquar Lighting, one of the industry’s most coveted honours for creative effectiveness.

Along with the agency’s work on Lahori Zeera, the Jaquar Lighting campaign reflect what Khazanchi believes clients are increasingly demanding from agencies today: disproportionate impact.

“Clients are always looking for agencies that can create a disproportionate amount of impact,” he says, pointing to how creators such as Samdish Bhatia and Tanmay Bhatt increasingly command attention that once belonged to brands. “The amount of content out there is insane. How does a brand win in the attention economy?”

For Khazanchi, attention alone is not enough. “It is a factor of both attention and relevance,” he says. “Doing a handstand by itself is not enough. What you are trying to say matters.”

That belief underpins Enormous’s focus on work that translates into business outcomes. Khazanchi points to Jaquar Lighting, which he says was a Rs 250 crore brand when the campaign began. Two years later, he estimates the business had grown to between Rs 900 crore and Rs 1,000 crore.

Lahori Zeera, he adds, followed a similar trajectory, growing from around Rs 250 crore to nearly Rs 800 to Rs 1,000 crore in revenue. He is careful to qualify the claim. “I am not saying what we did was responsible for all of it, but it certainly had a role to play.”

Such outcomes, he argues, require meaningful investment and a shift in how agencies are viewed. “Advertising agencies are not job shops or commodities,” Khazanchi says. “If we bring about impact that is desirable from a brand’s perspective, then we must get paid.”

Does that mean charging a premium? “We definitely do,” he says.

Craft remains central to that promise. Enormous, Khazanchi says, focuses on hiring people with strong fundamentals and then developing them further within the agency.

This philosophy is playing out at a time of flux for the advertising industry. Global network consolidation continues, while profitability pressures have forced several holding companies to recalibrate expectations.

Khazanchi believes the distinction between network agencies and independents is less important than the quality of work being produced. Any agency, he says, will do well if it delivers honest, intentional and proven ideas. He cites Leo and Ogilvy as agencies whose work he continues to admire.

What he is unwilling to do, however, is chase growth at any cost by working with unruly folks. “I have no desire to work with people you read about in some blog forums,” Khazanchi says. “We are not chasing our tail commercially. If our numbers are not met, they are not met. That is fine.”