New agency Utopeia aims to 'bring back the love' to advertising

Utopeia, another new agency, has set up shop in Mumbai. It commenced operations in December 2012. The agency is helmed by four founding members (managing partners): Sudarshan Banerjee, Ayan Chakraborty, Mitali H Srivastava and Sean Colaco, and has on board 17 people.

Banerjee and Srivastava hail from DDB Mudra where the former was head of DDB Mudra Ahmedabad; while the latter was associate vice president, strategy and planning at DDB Mudra Group. Chakraborty was chief growth officer, Percept, and Colaco comes from CAC (Creatively Active Communications), a part of which merges into Utopeia to provide a design offering. Besides the four, there are two managing partners: Krishna Padhye and Krishnaraj Bhat.

Utopeia will handle work on clients like Axis Bank, Baskin-Robbins, Nutrela, SSJ Seating Systems, Peri Peri and The Times of India, according to its founders. Specific details on retainers and projects were not disclosed.

The agency's slogan 'Bring back the love' reflects its intent of bringing back the love for brands, love for agency from clients, and love for agency from its employees. According to them, all three are diminishing and they want to revive it with Utopeia.

On the decision to turn entrepreneurs, Chakraborty explained, "We were all very happy doing what we were doing but there's always an opportunity of being happier. We felt we could do much more on the brands we were working on in an independent framework."

Srivastava explained the agency name: "When we were having conversations on zeroing in on a name for the agency, we thought that no other name could do more justice to our intention than 'Utopeia'.” The thought was that only in a perfect world, would the agency be able to do exactly what they wanted for a brand.