The Rise of Social-First Agencies in India
A new kind of agency grew up native to the feed. It moves faster, posts more, and is quietly winning the work the old shops used to own.
For decades the shape of an Indian ad agency was settled. You made a big film, you booked television and print around it, and social media was a small team in the corner reposting the campaign after the fact. Then the ground moved.
When the money moved, a new agency grew up
Digital overtook television to become the single largest advertising medium in India, reaching roughly half of all ad spend, and by the industry's own forecasts it is headed toward some 60 percent by 2026, with social media the biggest slice inside it. When the money moves that far, a new kind of agency grows up to catch it.
The pioneer was an act of stubbornness
The pioneer was less an agency than an act of stubbornness. Webchutney, founded in 1999 by Sidharth Rao and Sudesh Samaria, was one of India's first internet-native shops, built when the phrase digital agency sounded like a contradiction. Its vindication came decades later. At the 2022 Cannes Lions, the work it produced as part of Dentsu, The Unfiltered History Tour for Vice, won multiple Grand Prix, the festival's top honour. That mattered beyond the trophies. It proved that an idea born social-first could beat the traditional film-led establishment at its own awards, on its own stage.
A generation built for the feed
Behind that proof came a generation of independents built for the feed rather than for the thirty-second spot. Schbang, founded in Mumbai in 2015 by Harshil and Sohil Karia, grew into an integrated creative, media and technology shop working with names like Pidilite, Jio and Castrol. WATConsult started even earlier, in 2007, when Rajiv Dingra turned a digital-media blog into a full social and digital agency, a business eventually acquired by Dentsu. Sociowash in Delhi, founded in 2015, began as a social boutique and grew into a full creative digital agency. White Rivers Media, founded in Mumbai in 2012, built a culture-led, digital-first practice servicing entertainment and consumer brands. And the newest wave carries the pedigree of the old one. Talented, launched in 2022 by Gautam Reghunath and PG Aditiya, both alumni of Webchutney, is a modern creative company staffed by people who learned the internet-native craft at the pioneer.
Built around the feed, not the campaign
What actually separates these shops from the traditional agency is not just that they post more. It is how they are built. A traditional agency is organised around the campaign, a discrete project with a start, a shoot and an end. A social-first agency is organised around the feed, which never ends. It runs on continuous output rather than occasional epics, on monthly retainers rather than one-time project fees, on the ability to make fifty pieces of content a week and know which five worked by Friday. Speed is not a bonus in that model. It is the operating system.
The creator economy's own agency species
The creator economy has produced its own agency species to sit alongside them. Monk Entertainment, founded in 2017, is not a creative shop in the old sense at all. It is a creator and talent business managing hundreds of creators, built entirely around the audiences that live on social platforms. Five years ago you would have struggled to call that an agency. Today it competes for the same brand budgets as the traditional shops, because it controls something they cannot manufacture, which is a direct line to the audience.
The winner will pack integration
Ask the founders where this goes and you get a consistent answer about integration rather than specialisation. Harshil Karia of Schbang argues that the winner will not be the agency with the cleverest single skill but the one that can genuinely stitch them together.
The agency that will win is the agency that will pack integration.
He pairs data, creativity and measurable outcomes and, increasingly, artificial intelligence, while pointing at the next tier of Indian consumers in cities the metro-obsessed old model tended to ignore. The pitch is not that they do social. It is that they do everything, and they grew up where your customers already are.
That is the quiet turn in this story. For years, social-first agencies were treated as a supporting act, the team you brought in to handle the parts the real agency did not want. The budgets say otherwise now, and so does the Cannes metal. The feed stopped being the corner of the room. It became the room.
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