Recognising What Is Unexpected in Its Broadest Sense with DDB Mudra Group’s Aditya Kanthy
For Aditya Kanthy, CEO and Managing Director at DDB Mudra Group, life has been a series of ‘happy accidents’ and being a part of the agency when it announced its refocus on ‘Unexpected Works’ is just one more. “I didn’t really have any well-scripted plans on what I’d be doing with my life,” he says, though he does have some for how he’s going to apply his experience with leading the team to this new phase in the company’s history.
“The two parts of the equation which are unexpected and works being brought together, is that to get noticed, to be relevant, to help our clients achieve the objectives they’ve set out to achieve, to ensure that our people do the best work of their lives with us and that we are applying our time and talent to making a genuine difference to the world, it’s critical to recognise the power of the unexpected in its broadest possible sense.”
For Aditya this means to take creativity in its raw form and keep evolving as contexts and time change. The second part of the two-part equation he explains is to “know that the work that we do, the creativity that we celebrate is not an end in itself but a means to an end. The ultimate tribute to creativity or to the unexpected is that impact in the various aspects of our life.” In India, there is plenty of scope for this – and any – impact to be seen. A country with a population of a billion means a melting pot of different languages, cultures, religions and various ways of living and growing. In particular, he is keen to highlight that the pandemic has seen a shift in technology and what can be done to aid and change the lives of locals. “Millions and millions of people are challenging the old ways and discovering new ways of doing things; whether it is the way they shop, the way they entertain themselves, the way they learn or the way they make sense of the world. It is time for constant change and flux and it makes the promise of Unexpected Works even richer in the Indian context because we are navigating this change constantly.”