When you have an idea, a spark of creativity, or a solution, your brain, more often than not, goes “ting!” The Ting team took the idea quite literally.
Sudarshan Anandkumar, co-founder of Ting, along with his college friends, started Ting as an unofficial passion project in 2007. In 2009, after graduating from MICA, he wanted to get back to Ting, but the market was in recession. He applied to several companies before finally landing a job at Ogilvy in the servicing department. A few weeks later, he received an offer from JWT for copywriting. He requested his boss at Ogilvy to let him go. He wanted to try his hand at everything to see how things worked.
On a trip with friends, while chatting with his now-partner, Manan, Sudarshan proposed that they start Ting properly this time. The only condition he had was for his other friend, Shruti, to be a part of it. There, standing with a punctured tyre in Ooty, Ting was official. “We wanted to start it after 6 months, because we were both freshly employed at our jobs. My client from the early days of Ting, Aadil, who is now a partner, pushed me to start earlier, because he wanted some print ads designed for him by someone he trusted. I quit my job at JWT, just two weeks in, and dove headfirst into Ting with Manan, who also quit his job two minutes after I called him,” he laughs. “My mom was apprehensive, but my dad said if I had to fall, let it be now when I was still young. Manan, Shruti, and I started Ting with offices in Chennai and Bombay, and Aadil joined in 2011.”
When asked about the name Ting, Sudarshan says, “It’s language agnostic, and also when we started initially, every company was named after a person, place, or thing. We thought we’d name ours after a sound! It speaks the language of an idea, and doesn’t have ties to any specific language. It’s universal.”
In 2009, people weren’t as tech-savvy, and digital connections were few and far between. Networking virtually was a thing of the future at the time. They made cold calls, sending emails blindly like shots in the dark, hoping for a response. It was not easy finding clients; they relied on friends and family, like any company starting out. “I wouldn’t call it a struggle; it was the fun part of building Ting. As 20-21-year-olds, our only investment was our time. The same thing is challenging today too—client acquisition, growing our business, and how we sustain scale. Back then, it was two people whose salaries had to be paid; now we have a team of 550-600 members. Our perspectives were too small in terms of business, but we’ve come a long way,” he grins. Ting has offices in Chennai, Bombay, Bangalore, Cochin, Dubai, and London.
Ting is a fully integrated creative, strategic agency nurturing brands in the intelligent era
Sudarshan calls it a fully integrated creative, strategic agency. They’re not simply a social media or marketing agency. He explains, “The medium we use depends on the idea and where it can live longer, which is why we offer a host of verticals. Dodos, which is for branding; Qode, which handles the website development side of things. Initially, we had web designers but outsourced the development. Soon, we realised that the best way to execute an idea to the fullest is to marry it to the tech, so we built our web development team. Ting X is our social media marketing vertical; Turbine is performance marketing; CMYK encompasses all our offline work like internal communication; Parallel is an umbrella vertical which consists of strategy and planning. Studios is our film production and photoshoot wing, where we do brand shoots in-house in our studio spaces in Chennai and Bombay.”
In the future, Sudarshan hopes to see Ting as a proud, fully Indian but international agency. “We are fully Indian-owned and hope to continue like that. There are very few players in the market in the same space as us who remain Indian-owned. We have had conversations, but in the end, we always come back to being an Indian agency at heart, even though we work with 20-25 countries. All the work is done by people sitting here!” he exclaims.
The Ting team
Sudarshan talks about branding and how it has evolved over the years: “Unfortunately, in India, not many people see branding as an important aspect of building a brand. Design needs to be communicated with an overarching thought while being built, not as an arbitrary trait. That’s where strategy comes in. Being pleasing to the eye is one thing, but planning goes deeper than that and is vital to a company’s identity. Most people see branding as just a design exercise, but we’ve always worked towards changing that mindset. What looks good today might not look good tomorrow; it might look good to one person, but not another. We intend to bring a simple yet effective design language to all the brands we work with. There is a shift in the market now, with more brands taking storytelling and branding more seriously, as an extension of their company, which is great!”
In terms of things he has learnt running a company for almost 2 decades, he reflects, “There isn’t much you can do about a win or a loss when the day comes, but the biggest lesson I’ve learnt is to put your head down and keep working towards what you want to do and build. At Ting, as long as we look at a client-agency relationship as something beyond that, as a partnership, it’s going to be a success for us.”
Ting’s awards and accolades over the years
In an ‘intelligent era’, he describes the unignorable shadow that AI has cast over everything. “We say that we’re an agency powered by human intelligence. Even though AI has become the core currency of all the technology that we use, we ensure that all our strategies, thinking, and creatives are not coming from AI, but from human insights and experiences.”
He discusses some of their biggest milestones as a company. They didn’t fire a single person over the pandemic; everyone was paid their full salaries. They worked with Sun Network. All the people who work at Ting work as friends, and Sudarshan attributes that to the company being started by friends in the first place. “When I started the company, I did everything alone. Now, when I have an idea to crack with the team, it excites me every single time. I can say with assurance that today, work has become more than just earning money. It’s also about working in a place that makes you happy, and loving what you do. I’m very proud of the work we’ve been able to do, and we hope we get to keep going,” he smiles.
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