How GCPL's in-house creative pivot has paid off

Two years on, the move appears to be reshaping how GCPL approaches brand building across India, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The company’s Lightbox Creative Lab feeds creative campaigns for its hair colour to room freshener brands worldwide from an in-house team of about eight people.

In India, GCPL folded up accounts from agencies such as Creativeland Asia, Leo Burnett and JWT to merge all creative functions in-house. Creative is now as core to our business and no longer a support function, the company said.

In FY25, Lightbox helped the company save 40 basis points in costs and improved its creative hit rate.

The move was led by GCPL’s managing director and CEO Sudhir Sitapati, who believed the company had both the right size and culture to make an internal agency viable.

“Sudhir said, ‘Look, I am taking this call. I want to do this because for a company our size, it felt like the right way to run advertising,’" Ashwin Moorthy, global head of categories and head of marketing in India, said in an interview with Mint.

Historically, GCPL operated with multiple agencies, fragmented briefs and inconsistent execution across geographies. This made its marketing ecosystem slow, inefficient and diluted the power of our ideas. “We recognised the need to simplify, centralise and scale. We moved to a single-agency, global category model. This means we develop one central idea, and then adapt it for each geography with local casting, language and cues," according to the company’s annual report for fiscal 2025.

“What this unlocks is consistency in brand storytelling. It allows us to speak with one voice globally, while staying relevant locally," Moorthy said.

A&P Spends

Most large companies usually work with several agencies, including big media planning firms that handle advertising across TV, print, digital, and outdoor platforms. Most also hire third-party social media agencies to manage influencer engagement.

While there are pros and cons to using in-house versus external agencies, many companies—especially startups—have chosen to build their creative teams internally.

Food aggregator Swiggy, for instance, has an in-house creative team led by Mayur Hola.

In the 1990s, Lintas (now Lowe Lintas) was the dedicated agency for Hindustan Lever Ltd’s brands in India. The agency was originally an offshoot of Unilever, HLL’s parent company. However, HUL now works with different agencies for creative mandates.

In-House talent

Last fiscal, the maker of Cinthol soaps and Godrej Expert hair dyes spent ₹1,369.21 crore on advertising and publicity on a consolidated level. Of this, a majority went into media buying, and the remaining into creative and production. In FY25, the company reported consolidated revenue of ₹14,364 crore

Moorthy said what helps is having a bunch of creative hires sitting within walking distance of the marketing team. Ideas are tested quickly, without added layers of approvals.

“It has shaved off months from a campaign cycle because we’ve reduced the unnecessary back and forth," Moorthy said. Second, there is continuity. Once a creative has worked on a brand, they stay with it, the next film is seamless. Third, costs have stabilised. “I used to spend two months a year negotiating agency fees. That’s gone," he added.

Lighbox’s in-house team consists of Swati Bhattacharya, who heads the vision. Bhattacharya was previously the creative chairperson of FCB India. The team also includes Gaurav Kumar, lead creative strategist, who was formerly with Leo Burnett as executive creative director. Godrej's team includes Shalini Avadhani as a lead creative strategist.

In all, the team of 12 members, including visualizers and photographers, that sits out of the company's Vikhroli office in Mumbai produces about 35 campaigns annually for different categories.

Moorthy said the move has added more speed to creative output. “GCPL runs nearly twice the number of campaigns we ran in FY22," said Moorthy, citing that GCPL is a top 3 TV advertising spender in India.

Campaigns for the world

GCPL draws roughly 38% of its business from international markets.

While GCPL continues to work with creative agencies in international markets on a project basis, creatives ideated in India have been adopted in local languages in international markets.

For instance, in Latin America, GCPL launched a five-minute shampoo hair colour with a film built on the universal trope of the “always-late friend".

The insight worked well across markets from Argentina and travelled to Jakarta, and the ad was soon remade for Indonesia before making its way back to India. “We tested the same film in Indonesia from Spanish to Bahasa and we reshot it with local models in Indonesia," he said.

In South Africa, the Lightbox team worked on the Inecto hair colour brand with a culturally relevant campaign. “Women kept saying they felt judged by the colour of their skin. The team turned the narrative to ‘judge me by the colour of my hair’ with fashion colours (pink, blue, red, etc.). That idea came from Lightbox in India, but resonated deeply in South Africa," Moorthy said.

GCPL’s flagship household insecticide brand Goodknight has benefited from tapping into the in-house team. The same writer has scripted four consecutive films; “it’s built a depth of understanding the brand," he added.

Of course, not all experiments work, given that GCPL operates in mature markets where brand positioning and use cases may vary.

Diversity and consistency

Brands bring in third-party creative agencies to add diverse perspectives to their storytelling—something in-house teams may miss while focusing on consumers and go-to-market plans.

“The creative business thrives on diversity," said Shantanu Sirohi, chief executive officer at Interactive Avenues, the digital marketing arm of IPG Mediabrands.

“The role of the agency is to give your brand a share in a consumer's mind in this increasingly fragmented world—if that's the goal, then I’m not sure outsourcing is the best. You miss out on diversity."

But Vani Gupta Dandia, managing partner at CherryPeachPlum Growth Partners, a business consulting firm, points to several benefits linked to in-housing the creative agency. “The whole process of creative development would definitely be far speedier," she said.

Dandia also pointed to transparency in costs as an obvious advantage. “There is a happy opaque nexus between creative and production. Agencies take hefty cuts from the production houses they push forward to the client. Secondly, with an in-house agency, clients can save on pitch fees. Assuming, of course, they pay a pitch fee," Dandia added.

Additionally, it isn’t entirely uncommon for ad executives to move agencies—this may lead to some inconsistency in a brand's storytelling.

“Can an ad agency be true brand custodians and take forward brand assets with consistency? Yes, but only when the teams are small, core team members stick around for long stints, and the top management on either side has the maturity and business understanding of what it takes to build brands in the long run," she added.

Moorthy maintains that while creative work has moved in-house, GCPL still outsources media buying and production. “They bring their own lens and prevent ‘sameness’ across films," he added.

For now, Moorthy said the playbook for Lightbox is pretty “set".

“The only risk is if we lose people. We need to give the creative team more leeway and take leaps," he said, adding that talent is the backbone of execution.