Campaign India Agency Report Card 2010: Taproot

Type of agency Advertising

Company ownership Independent

Key personnel Agnello Dias and Santosh Padhi, chief creative officers  

Accounts won Pepsi cricket world cup project, DSP BlackRock Mutual Fund

Accounts lost None reported

Pepsi has been the biggest coup for Taproot this year, considering the cola major’s 15 year relationship with Dias’ former agency JWT. Naturally then, the win has upped the stakes for Taproot as far as expectations are concerned. With two major FMCG brands, two strong media ones and a host of other smaller brands in their portfolio, the future certainly looks bright. Taproot has been steadily adding work from the Times Group. It will be interesting to see how this relationship evolves. Taproot had a good haul at Spikes Asia and at Cannes this year. Aggie also spoke at Cannes this year as a speaker, which was a great session from all accounts.The agency won four Golds, two Silvers and one Bronze at Spikes Asia and thecountry’s sole gold at Clios this year. At Cannes, Taproot led the metal tally from India, with a Gold and a Silver lion.Great achievement in two years; the doubting Thomases don’t dare doubt any more.

How Campaign India rates the agency: 9

How Taproot rates itself: 8

It is now 20 months since Taproot India started and a lot has happened in that time. Starting with just The Times of India Group as our client, we’ve added Mumbai Mirror, NGC and DSP BlackRock, ITC, UTV as our regular clients. We also worked closely with for UTV Bindaas, UTV Movies and Bloomberg UTV, the launch of UTV Action and the new positioning for the group.We partnered the Nirma Group on a number of big ticket projects . And of course, we’ve just begun a major relationship with Pepsico India.Starting with just three people, we now have a staff strength of 26. Our attrition rate is negligible with just one artist leaving us since our inception. On the creative front, we were the best performing Indian agency at Cannes this year. And we were the only Indian agency in the Cannes Global Top 20 Independent Agency rankings. We followed that up with India’s best performance at the Media Spikes. We were the only agency in Asia to win  Gold Clio.In the Cannes Report 2010, Taproot India was ranked among the top 20 Highest Ranked Independent Agencies in the World. We were the leading Indian agency at the Asia Pacific Adfest 2010 with six metals. We were number nine among creative agencies in Asia and number one creative agency from India, according to the Creative Rankings published by Campaign Asia. Padhi was (two years in a row) the number one creative person from India according to Campaign Brief Asia Creative Rankings, Aggie was in the top 10 in last two years. Padhi was ranked third among top ten art directors in the world, according to Brand Republic.  Aggie featured in the Campaign Global 200 Power List. According to The Creative Rankings published by Campaign Asia Pacific,  Aggie and Padhi are ranked at number one as Creative Individuals in India.  According to the same rankings, they are both rated as top 25 creatives in Asia.