Exclusive | Craving every opportunity to set new benchmarks: Langoor's Ruchir Punjabi

Langoor, based out of Australia and Bangalore is currently a leading force in integrated creative services and products agency. The digital agency recently merged with The Brood, a MarCom agency to form one of Bangalore’s largest truly integrated creative one stop point.  Post this joint venture, the agency operates under the Langoor brand.

Langoor an atypical web services and products company presently has five major offices in Sydney, Australia and Bangalore, India with small outposts in Ahmedabad and Singapore.  As creative technologists the company enables organizations reach their full potential in the digital environment. It is one-of-a-kind advertising agency where creatives and technologists work together to deliver communication solutions both online and offline. Some of their clients in India include Wipro, Sikkim Manipal University, Nova Medical Centres, Fab India, TravelGuru, amongst others.

In an exclusive interaction with Adgully, Ruchir Punjabi, Founder & Chair – Langoor, who holds a degree in Computer Science and Technology (Adv) from the University of Sydney, shared insights on the journey of Langoor, its success story and also about their recent merger with The Brood.

Sharing about how and when the company was established, Punjabi said. “Langoor was started in August 2009. Langoor was more of a hobby than a planned strategy. I have been freelancing in the digital world since I was 15 years old. When I finished at the University, I continued getting work. I was thinking about jobs at that time, but the same day I got called for an interview from a major consulting organisation. I won two projects, one of which would pay my office rent for a year. That’s how we got started,” shared Punjabi.

He started working on various projects in the field of web design and development at the age of 15 and has since then already chalked up an impressive number of 500 projects during these years. He aspired to change the web design and development space which he considered highly saturated and unorganized as a market.

When asked about the story behind naming the company ‘Langoor’, as it refers to a monkey in the Hindi language, he smiled and said, “When I was thinking about business names, I discussed options with my Norwegian housemate. The only Hindi word he knew was ‘Langoor’. Initially, I laughed it off – but about a month in, the only name that stuck with me was Langoor. I really liked the fact that the name represented “crazy” one needs to be crazy to change the world. That notion stayed with me. Moreover at the time, I had no plans to open an office in India and Langoor gave me an Indian connection.”

For him the brand is all about un-convention, it’s about asking the right questions and then being crazy enough to pursue the answers, no matter what. It’s about making people happy with whom you work and ensuring that the brand is impacting lives positively and Langoor is at it!
Since its inception, Langoor has won quite a few awards, has established a credible brand and grown to 85+ people.  On asking Punjabi what led to the success of the brand, “However, I believe the success in this journey has been largely around the number of clients we have retained as we started work with them. Being able to communicate with people, share their goals and vision and help them get over the line on goals makes our business really worthwhile."

The Langoor team includes people who are passionate about their work and the clients they partner with across different areas and this will continue to be critical to the brand’s business moving forward.

Punjabi’s understanding of the international market of the domain which he is in is evident by what he had to say about the same. “The key learnings from the International market are around the pace of innovation and forward thinking. We’ve found that our clients overseas are willing to try out new things and trust us more than our Indian clients. Our Indian clients prefer playing safe – tried and tested. As a result, we used our work abroad often as examples to recommend strategies to our clients here,” he said.

Speaking about Langoor’s JV with The Brood, and what led to this decision, he firmly explained, “We were working with The Brood on a few campaigns for our clients where we combined creative and technology focused execution. Despite varied experiences and differently skilled teams, the leadership of our two businesses synced amazingly well. We were effectively offering our clients a way to achieve their objectives independent of the medium (i.e. online, print, etc) and we were doing it well. So we decided it made sense to work together. That’s how we ended up merging.”

“The Brood has exceptional and experienced people right from the top including Venugopal Ganganna, Girisha Gowda and Kishore Karumbaiah.  They are taking over the new entity – Langoor as CEO, COO and CCO respectively. I am personally stepping back to focus on strategy as Chair of the Board and will support the business where it needs me” he added.

Punjabi craves every opportunity to set new benchmarks and create an effective impact with his ideas. This has reflected in the fast rising popularity and growth of the company.

Talking about the agency’s edge over competition and the kind of opportunities he sees in digital market space today he opines, “On the digital front specifically, we are seeing a vast number of opportunities on the Internet beyond desktop, tablets and mobile. On platforms such as TVs, Near Field Communication devices, etc we see immense potential. We are finding that Indian businesses view the agency space as a play of multiple mediums –print, TV, digital – all in one place. So we will continue to offer the full spectrum in India.”

The idea of creative technologists has been discussed around the world since 2010. But Langoor realized that the focus is too much on the words or the phrase – not the intention of what the idea was meant to achieve. “We believe creative technologists use communication as a means of achieving the outcome – be it in creative, or technology, or both.  We plan to leverage the strengths of both our businesses as a new entity – one team, one culture to ensure we are able to help our clients reach their full potential. Yes we plan to be India's first Creative Technologists,” he asserted confidently.

His dedication and passion has seen the business flourish and so Langoor is currently exploring many more geographies overseas.
“We are actually at the cutting edge of the digital sphere. Langoor believes that our ability to innovate as an agency and lead the industry is what sets us apart,” concluded Punjabi.

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