Founded by Shivang Shah and Ashay Shah in 2019 as a digital marketing agency based in Mumbai, Django Digital has now decided to rebrand itself as ‘DJANGO’, dropping the ‘Digital’ bit from their name.
But since this development interestingly comes at a time when the agency has turned five years in age, Marketing Mind reached out to the indie agency owners- Shivang Shah and Ashay Shah to get more clarity on what this rebrand actually translates to in terms of the agency’s services, clients as well as the road ahead of them.
According to Shivang Shah, the decision to drop the word ‘Digital’, the vast media which has pretty much set advertising and marketing world ablaze all across the globe and has shifted the flow of media spends from traditional mediums to new age ones, is rooted in the fact that over time, the agency has expanded the scope of its services from just digital to providing 360-degrees integrated solutions to clients.
Having said that, what does DJANGO really mean for the larger masses and of course, the agency and its clients?
The way Shivang puts it is that DJANGO in Romany (derived from Hindi), the language of the gypsies, means ‘I Awake’.
“The D in our name sure does represent our strong suit i.e. Digital and hence for our clients, we provide solutions that Digitally Awaken their brands. In fact, we were lucky enough to have done work beyond Digital for them and hence the decision to drop the word Digital from our new branding activity,” he said.
With this, he also assured that this name change definitely means that the agency is poised to grow its strengths in other mediums and not sideline Digital in the process as the start of ‘DJANGO’ like their inception as a digital agency still begins with a ‘D’ after all.
Adding to Shivang’s sentiments here, his business partner Ashay Shah said, “We’ve been closely watching the larger advertising and marketing landscape and we’re noticing how the gap between mainline and digital is quickly closing. Hence, while we’ve always been creative at heart and agnostic of the medium, we now feel equipped to deal with any marketing challenges within and outside the digital realm.”
Also read: Django Digital Drops ‘Digital’ From Its Name, Rebrands As DJANGO
Upon being questioned on the key reasons that led to the agency’s rebrand Shivang replied, “With Django Digital, the identity that came along was that we were too young, especially with our website and the overall branding. There have been times when we have been in the pitch room for some of the biggest names like Kerastase, MakeMyTrip, etc. but even though the ideas were loved, we didn’t go through in the final round because of the lack of experience, which is understandable.”
To this, Ashay added, “The new branding identity was created, keeping in mind our customers and how they used to perceive us as a young boutique agency. While we’re all still young in many aspects, we’ve also matured over 5 years to establish ourselves as seasoned partners.”
Representing this seasoned-nedd, what Django Digital has done is that it has not only changed the agency’s nomenclature but has also unveiled a new website, logo and more.
Elaborating on the idea behind some of these new-er elements, Niloni Pomal, Design Head, DJANGO, stated, “The new logo has an upwards holding arrow strategically placed in the G of Django and the thought behind it is that we as an agency always strive to bring progress to the brands that come to us and the colour orange signifies energy, freshness and enthusiasm in the colour wheel.”
“We wanted to use a colour that’s striking and bold, but use it in a way that does not make the brand look quirky, but more nuanced. Hence we kept the logo in tune with our overall communication- to be approachable with experience. The harmony between white, black and orange signifies that. We also add a bit of teal in secondary comms to balance the brand palette visually,” she added.
Having said that, on a forward looking note, Ashay also went on to point out that DJANGO isn’t young anymore and therefore, he hopes that the same will come across with the agency’s rebranding effort.
Being into the advertising business in India for the last five years, it was in the third month of the agency’s launch that DJANGO (formerly Django Digital, like any other company in the service business, hit its break-even point.
Talking about the agency’s growth journey ever since, Ashay emphasised that the agency’s growth trajectory wasn’t linear at all, owing to the fact that the global pandemic had a catastrophic effect on a lot of businesses eventually translating to consciously lower spending on ads.
“Initially, it did seem like there was only one direction, upwards. However, post pandemic things changed quite a bit. More entrants, less VC money, a fair bit of consolidation amongst giants, amongst other things led to a super weak FY 23-24. We did bounce back from that and are now on track to complete this year as our best one so far,” he added
Furthermore, with the new rebranding in place, he clarified that DJANGO is not looking to expand to other markets just yet, but it could happen over the next few years.
“Currently, we’re focused on sustained growth for ourselves and our clients and hence, we’re growing in terms of our team size, office space and service offerings,” he said.
Adding to Ashay’s take here, Shivang also mentioned, “We are organically looking to scale to bigger brands. We want them to engage with at least 10-12 Fortune 500s this year in 2025.”
This year onwards, he emphasised that DJANGO would like to have a 50-50 balance with the project and retainer.
“No old clients have left, in fact, in 2024, we had 6 clients reassociate with us on the retainer front. If we can show a consistent upward trend from here, which we already have, we will be looking at that as a success of our effort,” he concluded.
