By Prasanna Singh
In Sidharth Rao, India’s advertising has lost not just one of its brightest stars, but a truly disruptive, amazing thinker and human.
We have an association going way back to early 2000 when I was a rookie at what was then agencyfaqs! (now afaqs!). Even as digital seemed to be a world of possibilities, actual online users were a tiny minority of people in India. We were all working out the possibilities, including how to make money when most of our potential users barely had online access. One day, my boss told me to check out a site called Gutterspace, which also seemed to be aimed at the advertising world.
I did and was horrified to see how good they seemed. It was just wildly different enough to actually work, with a radically different design and viewpoint for those times. Our fresh young site was positively conservative and conventional in front of it. As luck would have it, my boss at the time, Sandeep Vij, himself from Mudra, seemed to know Sidharth and asked me to meet him. And what a meeting that turned out to be. Sidharth and his partner, Sudesh Samaria, were completely unlike any potential ‘competitor’, and met me at their office in Green Park. He was way younger than I expected, shockingly irreverent and brilliant to me, willing to try out almost anything without any apparent worry about the outcomes.
It was a quality he was to carry for all the time I knew him, while adding dollops of generosity as he tasted success later on. While their studio Webchutney seemed to be surviving off one single large client to pay the bills and ‘experiment’ with Gutterspace, it was pretty obvious he was looking at a larger canvas at the time. So much so that I actually pitched Webchutney’s services to one of my earliest, and favorite clients at the time, HBO, led by Shruti Bajpai. The HBO deal required us to make a tonne of digital creatives every month, something we were simply not equipped for. Webchutney took over and from that tiny step, kept adding clients (slowly, I must say) till Sidharth cracked open the growth mantra and really took off.
It was great fun tracking Sidharth’s transition from an entrepreneur who was close to running out of cash multiple times, but never let that slow him down. His passion was contagious, as I regularly saw employees or founders backed by him push themselves and their startups to limits even they had probably never imagined. As he turned from a struggling entrepreneur to a somewhat maverick investor, the incredible awards and accolades Webchutney added even under the Dentsu umbrella were fantastic to watch from outside, as I knew somewhere, it was a seemingly crazy idea Sidharth must have had, or decided to back. So it was no surprise when Dentsu Webchutney won the Agency of the Year at Cannes Lions in 2022 for The Unfiltered History Project for Vice Media.
Of course, by the time the awards happened, Sidharth was onto his next project at Punt Partners. Never one to be tied down to a ‘path’, his move to startup yet again with Punt Partners, a Martech-focused firm was being watched for all the possibilities it would bring alive yet again to this new field. In his going, we can be sure that we will miss out on some stunning highlights for the sector, even as the broader communications sector counts its losses. Travel well, Sidharth.
The author is co-founder, SaurEnergy