Year-ender 2021: 'Believe in people, their resilience and their creativity' – Gautham Narayanan

We ask industry leaders for their learnings from 2021, and an outrageous prediction for the year to come

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Year-ender 2021: 'Believe in people, their resilience and their creativity' – Gautham Narayanan

Campaign India is ending the year by asking industry leaders about what this year taught them and an outrageous prediction for 2022.

Here's what Gautham Narayanan, managing director, Wieden+Kennedy Delhi, had to say:

Your stand-out moment or learning from 2021?

When in the eye of the storm, believe in people, their resilience and their creativity.

Our wonderful team with considerable constraint, pressure, and emotional strain, supported each other, picked themselves up, and flexed their collective, creative muscle in 2021. We helped Oppo enter culture, built a disruptive world for gamers with HP Omen, played a small role in helping the Johns Hopkins Institute India drive up vaccine uptake in the country, and continued to help IndiGo’s, lean clean flying machine, conquer the skies.

An outrageous prediction for 2022?

I’ve resisted the temptation to talk about NFTs and the inevitable rise of the new CCO (chief crypto officer) in agencies.

My prediction is that culture (and not technology) will be our most effective weapon against the biggest threat we face as an industry, which is the brain drain, (recently dubbed, the great resignation). Whether we like it or not, this will continue. Some may see this as a threat, but I see this as a great opportunity for creative companies to embrace asynchronous working practices and give people more freedom in how, when and from where they interact with employers. Our job is to find the best talent, give them the flexibility to work on their terms, but safeguard emotional well-being and protect them from burnout.

W+K’s company-wide week off will continue. Our work from any air policy allows people to escape the Delhi pollution from November to January and work from anywhere in India is here to stay. We’re back in the office to figure out how to not (always) be in the office and we’re very open to working with people anywhere in the country.

We need to listen and respond to the changing nature of work and how we look at the emotional and legal contract with a new generation. Failure to do so will have material consequences for the future of our industry.