Mumbai: The Hubverse claims to be a modern-day agency of agencies that works with brands and creators to shape meaningful digital experiences that shape an engaging community. Its focus is both, to drive business results and to leave a dent in culture. It helps founders build brands and helps brands build communities.
The agency conceptualizes, creates, and produces game-changing ideas and content that help build a thriving community. It helps build social currency and connect with just the right creators who will amplify your story. Collaboration is in their DNA. The Hubverse is always on the path of connecting creators and brands to enable cross-pollination of communities. Predictable virality, emotional storytelling, and digital PR are what it specializes in.
Also, the group is building a digital community-building platform for brands & creators to collaborate. They do this by sparking collaborations between upcoming creators and mission-driven local brands through their media house, The Hub Bengaluru.
With a collective reach of over 12M, as a media house, it strives to connect and collaborate with different creators and brands from across the country and is building India’s first creator house. Its community is a gateway to 1000+ artists, creators, and brands. By spotlighting upcoming talent, it helps them connect with entrepreneurs, brands, and partners.
Circling back to The Hubverse, there are 10 agencies that fall under its banner. Azaan Feroz Sait leads five of them – Dark Mode On (a PR agency), Phooling.Around (a creative design agency), Mayramid (a creator relations agency), Commoisseur (a digital communities agency), and Safina Ventures (a growth consultancy).
Tees FPS (a video production agency), IMP/ACT23. (a creative writing agency), SoChill Gully (a social media agency), Dopameme.in (a meme marketing agency) and Nerd Monkey Entertainment (an event management agency) are taken care of and led by The Hubverse director – digital activities Vikram Nandakumar.
In an email interaction, Indiantelevision.com in chatted with The Hubverse founder Azaan Feroz Sait about the journey of The Hub, the ten sub-agencies under the umbrella of The Hubverse, launching in Dubai and much more.
Edited excerpts:
On the thought and journey behind launching The Hub
The idea behind launching The Hub was to launch an antidote for loneliness – which is what our generation experiences on a fundamental level, as much as we might be connected on social media platforms. After college, there is a real downer that we all go through when it comes to our social life.
I wanted The Hub to be a place where people can find common ground, connect again and live a more socially connected life and not just pretend to live one on social media. It started ironically with co-living and branched out into co-working and event spaces that brought people together offline. Today, we are helping people connect more meaningfully both online and offline through our internationally recognized approach to community building.
Our online communities were pandemic babies born with the humble intention to fight the isolation we all were experiencing. But we soon realized that you need a perfect balance of offline and offline connection in today’s ever changing world. Which is why we created a one of a kind hybrid ecosystem that enables connection across the physical and digital worlds. We want to allow our members to feel connected wherever and however they are comfortable. Think of it as the perfect balance between privacy and community.
On how easy or difficult it is to compete with the Wunderman Thompson’s, Havas’, Dentsu’s of the world
We do not see anyone or any agency in this world as our direct competitors. What we offer is 100 per cent unique. Our approach to offering Community as a Service is truly people-centric and combines our learnings from running multiple digital communities of our own. I don’t know of any other agency that runs both digital and offline communities of its own.
If you look at how we brand and position ourselves, it is always crafted with love by a human being albeit backed by intelligence and research by AI. Since we are smaller, we are more nimble. Our approach is 100% client-centric. We never work with more than 5 clients at any given point and this allows us to obsess over hyper-personalized storytelling. If you were to look at larger agencies such as Dentsu or Schbang, the whole company probably works for 500 clients. As much as we look up to these larger agencies it’s almost impossible for them to execute personalized storytelling when you are servicing so many clients!
On the 10 verticals of the company
The common element that brings in most of our revenue is high level creative consulting and strategy. At the end of the day, a video is just a video, a LinkedIn post is just a post and an Influencer campaign, just a campaign. What matters is how it was conceptualized, curated, and executed- and most importantly- how we acted on the feedback to iterate rapidly! Deeply listening to feedback and reiterating on it repeatedly at scale is what helps us deliver big results consistently for our clients.
So in simple words, the complete trust and creative freedom that our clients place in us is what helps us win, and very often this involves using a diversified portfolio of services to help our clients win. As a business owner myself, I often like to keep changing the tactics and services we offer clients based on what’s right for them at that moment- this is why consulting on what services are right for a client at any given moment is our most demanded service- even more than actually delivering on any one of them!
On The Hub venturing into new verticals
As Mark Zuckerberg said, 2023 is the year of efficiency. We have long-term plans, love to build in the open and talk about them. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we will act on all of them in one go. 2023 is about being realistic and narrowing down on the core 6 offerings where we can make the biggest impact for clients. If you were to look at our LinkTree our top 3 services are retainer based and the next 3 are a-la-carte. That is what we will focus on this year, even though long term we intend to do a whole lot more!
“Think big, act small” is our motto for the year.
On expansion
We’re planning an expansion into Dubai which should happen by mid-2024. Our first office outside of Bangalore will indeed be outside of India. We want to target the MENSA market and are very bullish on the opportunity there. We are positioning ourselves to offer value there.
On the digital media and social media space
All those buzzwords come and go and we have watched it happen. But what does not leave is good storytelling. Whether you are in the Metaverse, using AI, or even reinventing Web 2.0, you still need thoughtful storytelling and clear call to actions, that help founders build brands and brands build communities. Till the day there is a business alive on this earth or a product to be sold, good storytelling is going to be in demand.
On the moment meme marketing space
When you see a meme as a consumer, it will be viewed very differently – Haha I had a laugh or that was funny! But if you analyze memes the way we do, it is one of the hardest things to get right. Even a LinkedIn Article Expert may not be able to necessarily do what a person who can curate the perfect tweets can. Brevity shows your in-depth understanding of a topic.
Memes are the way brands can make social commentary on things that are culturally relevant today. And if people understand that about memes, it is one of the deepest ways to connect with the audiences, if done right at scale.
On Content creation, monetization of it is, and content creators reaping the benefits of this booming industry
Long term, I look at a creator as a mini agency. I think creators have been used wrongfully to tap their distribution, in the first attempt to use them. 2.0 of the Creator Economy will witness brands learning to look at Creators as long-term brand partners and alliances where they help with storytelling over a period of time.
You will need to have micro-brand ambassadors. That is the right way to deploy creators and I have been saying this since the get-go. Very few CMOs or founders understand this and very few agencies offer this only because it does not benefit them. It only helps the creator.
“I think every brand must have 3-12 micro brand ambassadors. That’s the right way to play this game”.
On the trends and innovations that are expected to disrupt the creative industry
KISS – Keep it simple silly! This year is about keeping things simple, using the tools and knowledge we have and not overcomplicating them. Simplify communication and processes and do not overanalyze pieces of content. Focus on the art of storytelling – everything else will fall in place.
On your vision and way forward for The Hub
My vision stems from the collective input I get from all the smart people in our team – a combined intelligence collection of the 23 creative minds that make up our Creator House. That tells me that never has there been a stronger need to do it all for clients. While the general consensus is that digital spends are on decline-and it’s probably best to niche down, I think at the end of the day we are in a service business and our job is to help clients achieve results. Sometimes we must wear many hats and use many tools to get the job done!
Whether a client is trusting us to help them sell a product, grow a community or attract partners. We can’t think “Our job was to make you an ad and we did it.” We need to see it through. The ad should be conceptualized for the right target audience, shot flawlessly, go viral and actually help sell the product. Until the client receives the end result, our work isn’t done! AI can and soon will commoditize single steps in the creative process but will never be able to go out of the scope of work to help a client win. That’s our job! Only a human will be willing to go the extra mile- to use our network, enable partnerships and collaborations and get the client what they need. It is about delivering results for clients and actually being able to help them make an impact. If you can do that, you can build something valuable in business of creativity!
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