Doggedness, Pure Grit and Some Cold Calls makes AdHog a Good Creative Agency

Adhog is a social media advertising venture driven by the passion of two digital media enthusiasts - Nitisha Pande and Kshitij Rihal. With an aim to literally hog the digital advertising space, they decided to take the plunge and setup Adhog in their final year of college. Kshitij has been a technological geek all his life and Nitisha’s always been a voracious reader. They’ve known each other for close to nine years and their stints at few digital agencies made them realise their true passion.

Kshitij confesses they did not start with a business plan and still don’t have one! Started in March, 2012, their first step in doing business was to cold call a lot of potential companies, one of which was Rana Atheya’s DogSpot. DogSpot and Adhog have already completed their first anniversary of being together and are still going strong. It is startling to know that Dogspot.in loved their ideas so much, that they agreed to be their first client without even meeting them.

With an open work culture and perks of unlimited vacation policy, team holidays and movie marathons, the nine people company presently operates from Mumbai and shall soon be expanding to Delhi. Adhog has serviced 20+ clients last year and currently has 18 accounts which are live.

Kshitij tells us that every digital/social media agency is their competitor. While most agencies are doing good work, there are very few agencies doing great work and that is where Adhog wants to be the differentiator. They are building a team which will execute great work, and if the team has to be believed they have already done some really exciting never-done-before campaigns. Simultaneously, Adhog is also building a proprietary tool for comprehensive social analytics, which will make a lot of difference for any digital marketer.

Breaking even in the first month and half of starting operations Kshitij says they don’t compromise on costs while offering services. They believe getting business by under-cutting other business does not make sense in the long run and is not a scalable business model.

Whenever Kshitij and Nitisha go to meet a prospective client, people at the client’s reception always confuse them for prospects who have come for job interviews. And this has happened many times in the past.

Kshitij’s advice all student-entrepreneurs is to start their working life with a startup. Because the opportunity one gets to learn, ideate, innovate, disrupt is unparalleled! It's not an easy journey, especially because the Indian education system isn't accommodating of entrepreneurship. But like founders of AdHog and many other student entrepreneurs have shown – where there is a will, there is a way.

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