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As the demand for short content rises, independent digital agency Schbang has launched a new division, The Global Content Hub. In an interview with Storyboard18, Harshil Karia, founder of Schbang, says, “The business model is simply to bridge the gap in the existing market on quality content creation whether it be video/audio or static imagery.” Karia tells us about the agency’s big picture on content production and key trends in video storytelling.

How different will The Global Content Hub be from Schbang's existing production services? What will it bring to the table? 

The objective of The Global Content Hub will be short-term content creation while the production house - Schbang Motion Pictures will be focusing on creating long-form video assets with long-term brand recall. There is a need to differentiate between long-term and short-term content. Long-term content has repeat value and can be used across media. It requires planning, research and skill to develop. The short-term content has a low shelf life and are produced quickly as brands have to keep pushing out content. While Schbang Motion Pictures will develop long-term assets, The Global Content Hub will focus on developing assets with a shorter shelf life. It will also cater to a much larger audience, onboarding agencies and creators and influencers in addition to brands.


How big is The Global Content Hub team going to be? What kind of talent are you planning to onboard?

The team currently is an 8-member team with talents that are producers, directors, photographers, videographers and art directors. We are looking to expand the team and get in more creatively driven talents to join us as we grow the service in the next few months. The team will be operating individually primarily out of Mumbai and Bangalore as we have set-up two studio spaces in both locations for creators, brands, and agencies to rent out and shoot with us. The focus is on a global outreach business plan, to be able to shoot with global businesses and global brands.

Will The Global Content Hub work closely with Schbang's existing clients or will it pitch for a different set of brands? What is the business model?

The Global Content Hub will cater to brands, but it will also go way beyond brands. It will include influencers, agencies, and companies. And yes, it will be offered as a value added service for our existing clientele while we are building the business with a digital-first ideology. We already are getting enquiries from D2C and e-commerce brands. The business model is simply to bridge the gap in the existing market on quality content creation whether it be video/audio or static imagery.

How did the company identify the need gap? What's the big strategy? Also, how does this new division fit into Schbang's network play?

Digital content is becoming the most integral part of marketing strategy. We are in a world where brands and creators have to keep pushing out the short forms of different forms to engage with users. There is a need in the market to build these short-term assets which have a short shelf life with a quick turnaround time. This is also because it is also essential to jump on trends within 48-72 hours for gaining maximum traction to be able to stay relevant for many brands. The Global Content Hub will cater to this need of the market.

The Schbang Network is a different play in this case. The new division is an extension of our existing business for an audience that is looking for a player to solve their challenges in the content creation of short-term assets. The network plays a different role, a role of enabling young startups to scale, capture market that is untapped and create a larger impact across the country. 

What according to you are the big trends in videos? Are marketers doing enough? What are the unexplored areas?

Videos are gaining more importance than ever before. It is important for brands to have both long-term assets and short-term assets. Some short terms assets, like reels, are also used to drive traffic to the long-term assets. However, the variety included in videos is constantly evolving. Videos have integrated artificial intelligence, augmented reality, 360-degree views and animation.

Marketers are also trying to find new ways to integrate this variety into their content while continuing to look for newer tech integrations well.

How are brands responding to the hyper-short video content format that’s out there across social apps? 

Platforms and the algorithm of platforms are pushing hyper short content whether it is YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels or any other apps. Brands need to take a call on whether to participate in it or not. For the brands that do participate in it, they are using a combination of micro-influencers, creators and product-based short-term content. This content is packaged to showcase the value of products through stop-motions, motion mapping, cut mapping, etc.

Within our ecosystem, Kotak 811 is creating short-term content really well. We have also built short videos on food-based content for brands like Domino’s and London Dairy. 

With consumers’ attention span shrinking, do you think the appetite for long-format content will fade away with time? What are real viewerships trends that you are noticing?

I do not think that long-term content will fade. However, long-term assets have to be built with perfection to capture consumers’ attention. These assets require research, testing and planning to build an asset which has repeat value. A long-term asset used to have a repeat value of about 3-5 years, which has now shrunk. However, brands need both long-term assets and assets which have a short shelf life. The short-term assets have be constantly pushed out to engage with consumers because the attention span is shrinking. Brands can use The Global Content Hub to create a wide variety of short video assets which have a short shelf life. For instance, GCH is currently working on a series of reels for Fevicol on Instagram.

Are platforms like Instagram and other Indian apps working for brands today or creators? What’s your take?

I think platforms are working for creators because platforms are working to serve their audience. Therefore, brands have to work like creators to get the most out of the platform.

How Schbang plans to crack the short-term content game

Meme marketing is becoming the latest tool in companies’ digital marketing arsenal. More companies are devoting a bigger portion of their budget than ever before towards meme marketing, and specialised companies are stepping in to help them go viral.

But why memes? “That is the language that Netizens understand. People don’t want to be preached to. Memes subtly integrate brand messaging into conversation,” says Aditya Sobti, creative lead at Schbang, a creative and digital transformation agency. “Customers don’t know their time has been taken (by a brand).”

Take the case of the recent trailer for the movie Brahmastra, starring Ranbir Kapoor, Alia Bhatt and Amitabh Bachchan, among others. A dialogue said by Kapoor’s character Shiva in the trailer – ‘Kuch rishta hai mera aag se (I have a strange connection with fire)’ – quickly became a meme. Several brands like Tinder, Dunzo, Zepto and Voot were quick to catch on, and posted their own variations of the meme.

“Memes are a part of our day-to-day lives,” says Saksham Jadon, founder of Youngun, a meme marketing agency that was started in 2019. “And brands want to be part of internet conversations.”

Youngun handles clients such as Netflix, PepsiCo, Swiggy and Cred.

A short history of meme marketing

According to Sobti from Schbang, the meme marketing trend in India was started around 2018 by brands like Zomato and Swiggy, both of which are in the food-delivery space.

Many startups typically didn’t have much money to spend on recurring campaigns that are heavy on print ads and TV commercials, which are typically expensive.

Instead, they relied on a more irreverent – and practically free – marketing style which involves catching on to the latest trending topics online and putting the brand’s spin on it. And this often involved memes.

An analysis of Google Trends indicates that the search term ‘meme’ had been slowly gaining in popularity in India since around 2013. When compared to the worldwide trend, growth in India was slow.

The real spike happened during the pandemic-induced lockdowns in March 2020, when millions of people all across the world were stuck at home, with little other than their phones and laptops in the way of entertainment. While worldwide interest in memes grew at that time, India’s growth was much faster, and stabilised at about 75% of those levels since then.

Startups and their marketing teams were quick to catch on. The ability to make memes is even a part of the job description for a social media role at a startup. Fintech unicorn Slice even has a ‘Chief Meme Officer’.

The method to the viral madness

Brands that don’t have their own meme makers go to agencies like Jadon. “We’ve cracked how to make it so organic that even news publishers will pick it up. We make sure it’s worth people’s time.”

For instance, Youngun handled the meme marketing for the recent ‘Ranveer vs Wild with Bear Grylls’ web episode, featuring actor Ranveer Singh. The trailer sparked a meme fest, and ended up getting covered by several news outlets.

Brands are also exploring user-generated memes, but with a caveat.

Meme Chat, a meme community social media app started in 2019, enables brands to take this route. Kyle Fernandes, 24-year-old co-founder and CEO of Meme Chat, explains how the process works, “A brand sponsors a meme template. Our users generate thousands of memes, which are curated by moderators. The best ones are shows to the brand. If a user’s meme gets selected by the brand, they get paid Rs.5-10.”

The chosen memes are propagated across meme pages on Facebook and Instagram. Meme Chat said it owns 100 meme pages with a total following of 60mn and has tie-ups with another 300 that have a following of 540mn, meaning it can tap a collective following of 600mn.

[caption id="attachment_1307" align="aligncenter" width="700"]<img class="size-full wp-image-1307" src="https://images.storyboard18.com/storyboard18/Kuch-viral-bana-do-yaar.jpg" alt="Kuch viral bana do yaar" width="700" height="1200" /> Kuch viral bana do yaar[/caption]

Meme Chat has done campaigns for companies such as Britannia, Moj (owned by ShareChat) and films like Jugjugg Jeeyo. Last year, the company raised $1mn in a funding round led by BeeNext, a Singapore-based venture capital firm.

OTT platforms are the biggest clients for meme marketing agencies, followed by e-commerce and digital startups.

Sometimes, memes can also be "seeded" via influencers and content creators – they either repost these memes, or make their own versions of them. And when multiple brands are handled by a single agency, the agencies ensure the brands end up participating in each other's meme trends online, seemingly organically.

Larger, more traditional companies are slow to the uptake, says Sobti. Lawsuits arising from copyright infringement are the main concern, even though lawsuits like these are rare.

Way back in 2015, Getty Images asked GetDigital, a German blog, to pay licensing fees for using a picture of a penguin from their image database to create what would become a widely popular meme called ‘Socially Awkward Penguin’.Getty said they were trying to protect the livelihoods of photographers who click such photos. GetDigital was also asked to keep quiet about it. They didn’t.

In a later report by Huffpost, Getty said they had pursued similar action against several such blogs who used images in this manner.

“Companies like Jio and Britannia have a lot to lose,” says Sobti. “It’s been tough to convince them, (but) slowly and steadily, brands are warming up to the opportunity – they know they will lose out on social media reach otherwise.”

Britannia recently launched a meme campaign for the launch of a new biscuit. The campaign was managed by Schbang and Meme Chat.

A numbers game

Meme marketing companies can change anywhere between Rs.2 lakh to Rs.3 crore, depending on the duration of the project.

Memes are now becoming a bigger part of companies’ marketing budgets. Snehil Khanor, CEO of Indian dating app TrulyMadly says that meme marketing now makes up 30-40% of his content marketing budget, up from 7-10% when they first started meme marketing about two and half years ago.

“We see very good engagement for memes versus other posts. Users are able to relate to it – it doesn’t seem like advertising,” says Khanor. Video memes are now becoming more popular versus static ones, says Khanor.

What constitutes virality? It depends on who you ask. Fernandes says that it would have to be about 10 million in reach and engagement numbers would constitute virality. Jadon says that it’s viral when news publishers organically pick up stories on memes, or the meme makes it to the meme review video of an influencer like Tanmay Bhat.

But sometimes, it’s hard to tell what’s organic and what’s not.

For instance, a recent meme that went viral was a screenshot of a WhatsApp conversation between a college student and his dad. Storyboard18 spoke to the original poster of the meme, 23-year-old engineering student Jitu Malani from Ajmer. Malani, who posts memes on his Twitter page, said he had no idea that this screenshot would go viral. Malani said he was approached by a few news outlets after the meme went viral, although not by the brand itself.

While the meme appears not to have been posted by the brand, the story was picked up by several news organisations. Jadon put up a LinkedIn post with screenshots of the coverage, with the caption ‘Remember this viral meme? Work by Youngun – a Meme Marketing agency for Swiggy’.

Similarly, yet another viral post by Swiggy shows signs of the blurring lines between brand-led and organic viral content.

In this case, it was a video of a man on a horse carrying a Swiggy delivery box. Three days later, the brand put out a tongue-in-cheek notice saying it had taken note of the viral video, and announced a reward for whoever identified the horseman. The day after that, the app’s delivery status section had a modification which showed a man on a horse, instead of the usual bike.

A week after the meme went viral, the company put out another letter, saying it had identified the horseman, as well as the person who shot the video.

Sobti says that, typically, changes to an app take weeks to plan and execute. He added that this particular meme was considered a well-executed campaign in marketing circles because of how organic it looked.

In response to questions about the story, Swiggy sent links to the notices it posted on its official Instagram page (described above).

Sobti says there’s no harm in marketers trying their best to make memes look as organic as they can.

The audience has a few laughs, and the brand wins too.

[caption id="attachment_1306" align="aligncenter" width="700"]<img class="size-full wp-image-1306" src="https://images.storyboard18.com/storyboard18/Manufacturing-Memes-How-meme-marketing-works.jpg" alt="Manufacturing Memes - How Meme marketing works" width="700" height="700" /> Manufacturing Memes - How Meme marketing works[/caption]

Engineering the viral: The science behind meme marketing

A young graphic designer switched to freelancing for a digital marketing agency in Mumbai. The designer, who requested anonymity, had previously worked as a full-time employee in the same company. She recalls how, as the workload increased, she would stay up for days till 3 AM and in ‘urgent’ scenarios till 6 AM, working on projects. It took a serious toll on her mental and physical well-being. When she raised a complaint at the agency, the general response was “Arey! Client hai. Paise de rahe hain.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
When I say ad agency life is toxic in Mumbai, I truly mean it.
Here's a response of a so called reputed ad agency on Glassdoor to an ex-employee who described his bad experience with the company. The sheer arrogance! <a href="https://t.co/tAovXNXmMh">pic.twitter.com/tAovXNXmMh</a>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">When I say ad agency life is toxic in Mumbai, I truly mean it. Here&#39;s a response of a so called reputed ad agency on Glassdoor to an ex-employee who described his bad experience with the company. The sheer arrogance! <a href="https://t.co/tAovXNXmMh">pic.twitter.com/tAovXNXmMh</a>&mdash; Moon (@mysticmoon__) <a href="https://twitter.com/mysticmoon__/status/1537863549048872960?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 17, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

On June 17, a digital marketer who goes by the handle @mysticmoon_ tweeted screenshots of responses of a digital marketing agency on Glassdoor, a platform where current and former employees anonymously review companies. The agency had responded to complaints raised by the agency’s ex-employees about grueling work schedules, office culture and compensation. The company’s response raised a storm for its lack of empathy.

Sample these lines from the response.

‘No time for your personal life. 24x7 work - This is how the Digital industry works. Please go through our careers section. We have already disclosed the life you will be leading when you get into Digital Marketing. No one said it would be easy.’

‘Working on weekends - If you deny, your salary will be deducted.’

‘If you as an executive cannot handle the brand, then ideally you were never meant to be in Digital and you are incapable of taking the responsibilities.’

‘No fixed leaving time - Yes, indeed. This is not a 9 to 5 government job…We seek creative candidates who love working on brands. When one is building brands, time is secondary…’

‘…Another alternate scenario when you would be working late is when you are correcting your own mistakes. If you cannot understand the client and the brief you are bound to get frustrated. But this is your own fault.’

These responses on Glassdoor were later deleted. But not before users like @mysticmoon took screenshots and shared it on social media.

She shared, “I'm just numb reading such response. Is there any humanity left? Especially in ad agencies?! Are your employees not humans? Is it just about the money at the cost of someone's mental health &amp; life? Wonder what measures are being taken to prevent this!”

She goes on to share that she too has had such an experience and had to leave the firm within a month of joining. The trauma she experienced in that short time had stayed with her for a while. But she, like many others, has bills to pay, she said, ruing the fact that there’s no other choice for many but to “tolerate and live a toxic work-life.”

A digital world never sleeps

WPP-owned media investment company GroupM’s ‘This Year, Next Year’ report for 2022 highlighted that Digital would grow by 33 percent, and would have an estimated share of 45 percent in total expenditure of advertising. Brands are allocating more marketing money in digital, sending the volume of work skyrocketing as the media pie gets bigger.

The relentless pace of work and hectic and high-pressure environment have been a subject of debates and discussions on social media and offline. Unrealistic client expectations and demands contribute to the woes of people working in digital marketing agencies which are facing high employee attrition rates, as high as 30 percent as per industry estimates.

Afraid to lose business or upset a client in a tough economic climate, agencies typically accept even the most unreasonable demands from clients. A creative director working with a Bengaluru-based digital advertising agency tells us that work culture in many agencies actually became worse with the onset of the pandemic.

“I rate toxicity by two things. First, by the people, and second by the leaders who fuel it wherever they go,” she tells us.

A group creative partner at the same agency spoke about calls that would come at any time, stressing that such unhealthy work cultures also stem from the behaviour of the clients.

@mysticmoon_ agrees with him and states that the fast paced nature of the digital world has increased brands’ requirement to go viral, upscale their sales, make profits, be more creative, relate to their audience, and stay relevant in the market. “To achieve all that - they want everybody associated with them to work 24x7,” often at the cost of their health and wellbeing, the digital marketer highlights.

She shares the agency’s expectation from employees is to be accommodating of a marketing brief that could come even at midnight.

These bad practices are not restricted to digital marketing shops alone. Full-service mainline agencies have been hauled up in the past for the same issues including toxic work cultures, overworking employees, keeping inadequate compensation and reward systems, and creating a high-pressure environment that puts people’s wellbeing last.

Adding to a toxic culture

An ad agency’s former employees highlights that working late into the night at the office has become a regular practice in most agencies. “You would usually get something at 6 PM from the client, and would be asked to show the result by the next morning. Despite all the complaints, no action was taken by HR or seniors. If anything is required after office hours, it should be an exception and not a norm,” he tells Storyboard18.

Another employee of a mainline agency shares how senior executives would boast about working at all hours, competing with each other and showing “the juniors” what is required of them in advertising.

It gets particularly worse for female employees at agencies. These bad practices exacerbate the challenges for women in the industry who have also been fighting years of institutionalised sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace.

Agency employees Storyboard18 spoke to are quick to highlight that in advertising and media industries, there is also an obvious lack of empathy. Nobody says ‘Oh! You have worked for over 8 hours straight. Take a break.’

Another young creative says that there is no credit or additional compensation given for extra hours of work, adding that most small and mid-level companies do not have budgets to hire more hands which leads to more work being managed by fewer people and intense pressure on these people to still deliver despite the time, bandwidth and resource crunch. Eventually leading to issues like employee burnout.

For instance, when seemingly countless revisions are required on a campaign, some companies charge extra for revisions. At least five to six revisions are allowed. Then one begins to charge. But sometimes agencies are apprehensive and don’t want to charge the client, giving employees the short end of the stick in the bargain.

Hustle culture transcends

In the startup world, hustle culture has been celebrated widely by entrepreneurs, self-made gurus and influencers from the ecosystem. But the past three years we have witnessed a certain degree of backlash against the glorification of hustle culture which requires an extremely disproportionate amount of attention, time and energy directed into work, even at the cost of one’s physical and mental health. Hustle culture is also known as burnout or grind culture and is defined by workaholism and toxic productivity.

Despite the shift to a more balanced view on work and productivity, most organizations in the digital marketing space work with many startup brands, and several digital marketing agencies are startups themselves, and it seems there is a clear rub-off of cultures as the employees Storyboard18 spoke to suggest.

There’s also the matter of playing one against the other. A disturbing trend is brands engaging two agencies at the same time to pit them against each other, putting additional pressure on agencies which are already fearful of losing business in difficult market conditions and when there are many others who will do the work at competitive rates and quicker timelines.

Covid-impact on work and the industry

The homegrown, independent marketing solutions network Schbang’s head of culture and communication, Pranav Krishnan admits that the digital space has more to do with keeping up with trends that require execution on drastically shortened timelines and in high-pressure environments. This in turn translates to clients expecting agencies to remain on stand-by after hours and even on weekends.

For Krishnan, “It is of extreme importance to manage client expectations and only agree to reasonable timelines.”

He also shares that the agency was one of the early ones to adopt employee-friendly policies, adding that the company has also restructured HR policies to suit the needs of employees including the introduction of flexible work hours.

One of the first digital marketing companies in the country, BC Web Wise’s founder and MD Chaaya Baradhwaaj thinks that the isolation and disruption of a regular life, the economic pressures on clients, agencies and the ecosystems have probably led to things getting out of hand.

Baradhwaaj says, “To combat some of these issues, we have an ecosystem of vendors we work with to handle unplanned volume, negotiate and buy time when needed, and say no to what is not viable. There have been employees who are mandated to not clock more than 80 percent of their total time, and taking the time off becomes a must.”

Shradha Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of Grapes, also shares another view of the issues facing the industry today and a possible fix. As the jobs are many and there’s fewer good people to do them, there’s less ownership of the work. Agarwal adds some work-arounds to keep employees happy, promote collaborative cultures and give people opportunities to grow, while keeping the organization’s growth a priority.

“Now organizations are coming up with a comprehensive distribution of brands. This is dependent on the type of work-life balance a person is seeking. Those aspiring for aggressive growth are given agile brands. Those looking for a gradual growth are given passive brands,” she says.

How to fix a broken system and other solutions

We have seen instances of agencies turning away business or putting their foot down in the face of unreasonable client demands, placing their employees’ well-being first. But those are few and far between.

But some agencies are and have been taking the lead to make workplaces and work cultures healthier and productive.

In BC Web Wise’s recent survey with employees, at least 30 percent want to continue work from home (WFH), 40 percent prefer hybrid, and another 30 percent want to be at the workplace every day. Today, they have a hybrid model in place. Late schedules and working weekends are worked out in advance with clients and cleared with employees. They also have a system to ensure rotation of team members and employees are given days off.

Krishnan highlights simple measures that can help. For instance, shifting from WhatsApp to Slack to ensure that people logged off and paused notifications after working hours, and during the weekends.

He adds, “We have a strict no-weekend work policy wherein client briefs are not picked up past 5 PM on the last working day of the week. Even if team members have to work on the weekend, compensatory leaves are given which can be availed anytime over the month. Mental health leaves

Over the last two years, employees have also been given access to an in-house therapist. To create an atmosphere of ease and less stress for employees, Schbang also hosts in-office activities like open mic nights, games night, and numerous workshops.

Agarwal highlights that there is a three-pronged approach in place at Grapes to reduce the attrition rate. First is the hybrid or WFH model. Second is conducting internal training to help employees learn new skills. Third is making space for fun activities, and sessions to enable team bonding.

Digital marketing agency Sociowash’s co-founder Pranav Agarwal encourages collaboration among different teams in the organization to ensure that work between all teams is evenly distributed to meet tight deadlines.

He says, “Something all agencies should learn from traditional organizations is their process of streamlining, and clearly defining the roles and responsibilities of each team member.”

Sociowash came up with a measure called SuperBeings Survey, which was put in place to understand the perspective of teams on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The feedback from people is taken anonymously so employees can freely share their views and woes.

Schbang’s Krishnan highlights that the need for work-life balance was never a focus for companies till a few years ago. But that has changed now. The pandemic has reset employees’ needs, priorities and expectations, with people who are seeking healthy growth and more balance in work and life quitting in droves for better prospects in freelance work, at other firms or on the client's side; in some cases willing even to compromise on salaries in the process.
<blockquote>Krishnan says that the bottom line is “If the people in the industry are not cared for, we won’t see growth, creativity and innovation."</blockquote>

Cultures lacking empathy & work-life imbalance leaving employees burnt out and broken in digital marketing

SCHBANG