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Doubling Down On Risks, Bootstrapping To An 35 Person Team, And Reaching A Multi-crore Turnover. How-To-Agency With By The Gram

By The Gram, now known as BTG, is a content startup run by Aaliya Amrin, Eman Batliwalla, and Danisha Kohli. Founded in 2018, headquartered in Bombay. We spoke to them to understand how this agency started and what is it they exactly do.

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By The Gram Founders
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By the gram is new age content studio, servicing clients 360 degrees across the evolving content landscape. With loyal clientele like Netflix, TATA, and Lodha in the bag, we are uniquely unparalleled in taking the content world by storm; be it short format or our long format vertical. Within five quick years, we have sown our seeds cross-continents with growing bases in HK, US, and London to name a few, but also pockets in Kenya / Dubai. Our agency is multi-disciplinary, content first, with a massive focus on human touch points in all of our storytelling. We are neither an ad agency nor a production house we sit right in between and take on all your obscure to large scale content & production needs.

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Original content has become the cornerstone of entertainment, from household names to niche businesses - It’s not hard to see why - people crave originality and hate being sold to. As an agency, BTG has always been and will always be content first. With the economy bouncing back, the advertising industry is in aggressive boomerang. The handbrakes are coming off and brands are re-energised. Our primary play is already in motion. Currently we own the short format space, with an alarming monopoly over all things short form. We have finessed our production prowess and uber-niche offerings. Last year, we ventured into original content and long formats, ranging from our very own slate of eight episode series, to buying the rights for Hindi adaptions of the best KTV has to offer. The next two to three years will mean harnessing existing relationships in entertainment to house our long format vertical: BTG Films. Our think tanks and writers rooms are expanding, over the course of the next five years we see themselves with a dedicated department to long format and original content wherein we bring the writers, directors and producers - a triple threat.

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BTG’s intention in the new era is to provide future-proofing to clients. Future-proofing includes owning the brand experience and the data. BTG thrives at the intersection of creativity and tech. Now that more and more brands are looking to go direct to consumer, the idea is to own the customer relationship and the data that goes with it (especially with a cookie-less future ahead). Through this BTG works to evolve their clients from focussing on transaction and conversion, to deeper engagement, and customer loyalty.

Investing in the right creatives to build out a brands creative strategy will be instrumental in a world that is no longer ruled by algorithmic targeting. BTG’s goal is to get nifty with the privacy-friendly data available, in order to produce data-informed, clutter-breaking content - all whilst remaining personalised, relevant and compelling. BTG plans on investing in AI-powered creative insights to leapfrog our content performance to the next level. AI will dominate, when augmented with human touch. Until today, AI companies and content studios like BTG functioned separately, merging now and again on a token project without any long term synergy. In the next five years BTG hopes to bring in-house the technology, and infuse it into their day to day practises. With AI, agencies have an opportunity to advance digital advertising by eliminating guesswork in creative—constantly learning and optimising what is truly resonating with consumers. This will be step one in implementing high end AI innovation and eventually far more exciting adoptions for agencies like BTG in the ad tech space. They recognise the competitive advantage they have, which is to pair the AI with the right human touch, as for this to be done effectively and responsibly, human augmentation must play a critical role.

BTG was founded on the commitment to be 75% diverse and will continue to be that way years down the line. We firmly believe our women leadership, right from our producers and managers to our cinematographers and designers, has been the secret sauce to our global large scale productions, international presence, and our 16x growth over the last four years.

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