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Rina Chandran

Soft toys and bean bags make this office in Chennai a great place to work from.

Enter the rmg david office on Marshall's Road in Chennai, and you might think you lost your way. Which advertising agency has no cubicles, soft toys perched in strategic locations - one with its tongue sticking out - bean bags strewn around and a fence to mark the agency head's area? Well, WPP Group's rmg david does. The offices in Chennai and Mumbai, which are just across from the offices of their big brother, Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, often have an eyeball-popping effect on first-time visitors.

Besides the shock value and sure-fire conversation starter, there are other benefits: some people are so blown away, they want a job there.

And, the atmosphere has a desirable effect on its inmates, who deliver a better creative product, claims Raja Ganapathy, Vice-President and General Manager.

"Our philosophy has a direct bearing on the way we work and where we work," he says, adding that he prefers to recline in his beanbag during meetings. "Our mission is to provide challenger brands with an alternative method for solving advertising problems; this we try and achieve with the discipline of a large agency and the madness of a small agency. Hence, our workplace needs to provide an atmosphere of fun and freedom that stimulates creative thinking and produces out-of-the box ideas."

The design of the offices was the brain-child of a team of O&M veterans including Ranjan Kapur, Managing Director, India, and Chairman - South Asia (O&M), and Josy Paul, Country Head and National Creative Director, rmg david. They decided to design the India offices from a child's perspective: "After all, there can be nothing more creative or fun than a child's nursery," Ganapathy says. Fun elements were added to provide "diversionary relief" and encourage dramatic lateral thinking: bright colours, the absence of cabins, unorthodox work areas, soft toys, a basketball hoop, a dart board and video tapes of Teletubbies. Also, there is the suggestion of learning constantly, like a child does, and approaching each project with the curiosity and enthusiasm of a child. Besides, the core team felt that if they were asking their clients to think in a "dramatically different" manner, and put their money behind that, they themselves had do that too, quite literally.

The design was also intended to break away from the associations with O&M, a Rs. 1,000-crore Goliath in the industry. By contrast, rmg david, the agency that prefers the lowercase, is only two years old, and is a smaller agency in every sense of the word. It only has the core creative and servicing teams, there are fewer people and smaller spaces. Even its visiting cards are smaller, with the image of a smiling frog on the back - with which Josy Paul claims a resemblance - in the hope that they will all one day become princes, Ganapathy says.

"We were looking to break away from the conventional idea of an agency, so the look of the agency itself had to be dramatically different," says Ganapathy, himself an O&M veteran, who admits to a bit of a culture shock when he first visited the Mumbai office, after which the Chennai office is modelled. Clients love the difference, and often linger after meetings, and have threatened to come by more often, he says. In fact, before a new client is signed on, the agency brings them over to the office to introduce them to its culture, he says.

"Clients have understood what we are trying to do - the seriousness comes from the pedigree of our people, the strategy and the quality of the work we present to them," Ganapathy says. The only time the design of the office has posed a problem is when they have interviewed senior people, who have felt uncomfortable with the open layout, he says.

Still, they are aware that it is not all about fun and games: the fun and the freedom are to foster creativity, and are not at the cost of the client or the work. "The atmosphere encourages us to break out of our normal work routine and think dramatically. The concept of madness and discipline has really worked for us," he adds.

Picture by Bijoy Ghosh

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