murugappan

[murugappan]

Made a comic strip featuring Sales Influencer Tom Slocum

Here's the original post that went semi viral. And here's the comic strip in all its glory.

[murugappan]

Created a niche eBook

Oversaw this project from ideation to execution to distribution.

Credits

Content: Tanya Patange Subject Matter Expertise: Shawn Sease and Keith Daw Design: Riddhi Sonetta

[murugappan]

Released a promo video that was very well received.

Some lovely comments that made my day:

[murugappan]

Migrated our CRM from Freshsales to Hubspot. Completely out of my comfort zone, somehow the most rewarding project I've taken up during my time here at Humantic AI.

[murugappan]

My first billboard!

Design by Riddhi Sonetta.

[murugappan]

Created this interactive demo video which shows how Humantic AI works.

Animation by Niranjan Pramod.

[murugappan]

Created my first couple of case studies for Humantic AI.

I know I barely average 10 monthly visitors on this site, but still, here's a password protected sample just in case.

Enter muruismyfriend on the password field.

[murugappan]

Created this employee handbook for Humantic AI.

[murugappan]

From 'Least Creative Guy in the Room' to 'Most Creative'

How do you go from being the least creative guy in the room... to the most creative guy in the room?

Years of sweat and toil? No. There's an easier way.

You simply walk out of the room you're in, and into another one.

Now that's exactly what I did.

This February, after four or so years on the agency side, I joined the dark side. I became a brand custodian.

This journey has been plenty of fun — and full of learning. More on that soon.

But before that, let me clarify: I'm not being humble when I say I used to be the least creative guy in the room.

After all, I've always been the 'idea' guy. The first person to speak up at every brainstorming session. Scared to settle, dared to dream... an incredible asset to every agency I've ever worked with.

But here's the kicker. 99% of my ideas never saw the light of day.

Let me explain.

If you've been in any creative setting, you'd know that the first idea, most often, ends up being just that.

Good ideas are created and displayed to the world. Great ideas evolve before they leave the room where it happened.

Picture me, and one of my colleagues from LastBench, as cavemen.

We're sitting atop a hill, watching the sun sink, chatting shit, y'know... the usual prehistoric evening routine.

Suddenly, something strikes me.

I pick up a big black rock from the ground.

I hand it over to my cave-bud, and I say "I feel like there's something here... we should do something with this."

The response? He looks at me like I'm a mad man. Can you blame him?

As I hang my head in disappointment, something grabs my eye: another rock... brown in color, but just as big.

I pick it up and promptly hand it over to my friend.

We sit in absolute silence for what feels like hours.

The night sky starts burying the twilight; shoving it under the horizon.

I wonder if it's time we headed back to our caves. I look to my friend.

Sparks fly. Suddenly, it's not so dark around us.

My friend thought it could be fun to rub the two rocks against each other. And he ends up inventing fire.

That's my agency life in a nutshell.

People around me were inventing fire, and what was I doing? Picking up rocks.

It's only been 10 weeks since I hopped on this rollercoaster ride, but it's been fun so far. I have a team that's just as daring as I am, we're doing some incredible things... and we're only just getting started.

Fast forward to today.

I'm entrusted with the responsibility to pick up rocks AND invent fire, all the while putting out proverbial fires that tend to show up in a fast-paced startup.

But I'll be honest... it's not all greener pastures.

It's been a long time since someone ripped my work to shreds, criticized the hell out of it, but still said "Yes, and..."

There's no real conclusion to this piece, except, maybe... I love being the most creative guy in the room, but I really, really miss being the least creative.

[murugappan]

Conceptualized + executive produced multiple ads for Multipl.

(sorry, not sorry about the pun)

Hindi dialogues penned by Shashank Ganesh and Nikhil Suresh.

[murugappan]

The one employer branding initiative I'm super proud of

I started an employer branding initiative for LastBench in May 2021. It's been 4 months since I've moved on to a different organization.

And I'm thrilled to see that this initiative is still going strong.

When I joined LastBench, the whole team was remote. We were swamped with new clients: definitely a good problem to have for a rapid-growth creative studio, but I won't lie, I needed a breather.

To break away from business-as-usual, I decided to do a recap of the month, talking about what the whole team was up to. Both on- and off-work.

I had this idea on the 28th of May. On May 29th, Nikhil, our associate creative director, helped bring this vision to life. The whole thing was hacked together in an hour or two, and honestly, it wasn't our life's best work by any stretch of imagination.

But somehow, it caught on.

The one thing it had going for it - was that we branded it well. We gave it a punchy name and a repeatable treatment ("30 days in 30 seconds") and of course, being a visual studio and whatnot, we gave it a strong visual identity.

Another interesting creative choice we made, was going for instagram reels as our medium of distribution. Instead of immortalizing it, we made it a product of its time. Which, in retrospect, worked extremely well for an employer branding initiative, since a company's culture is always evolving.

The first iteration was about innovation.

The next few iterations were all about consistency.

Despite moving pieces and changing priorities, someone from the team would find a couple of hours to put this together. And we would tell the world all about our month: the good, bad, and ugly.

After the initial few months, it was more or less running on autopilot.

Soon, we benefited from this initiative in various — often unexpected — ways:

During job interviews, we started noticing how every new hire already had a fair idea about our culture, thanks to this series

Clients were able to identify our creative team by name, even before the client-facing folks could introduce them

When we missed a month-end deadline, one of our followers wrote in to tell us that they've been waiting for it. This was not a client or a future employee; just somebody who enjoyed these videos. It was at that moment I realized that good employer branding initiatives could provoke that kind of engagement from audiences beyond the primary talent pool.

An impulsive thought of mine from May 2021 has now bloomed into a video series with more than 25,000 views.

And the greatest thing about this series, if you ask me, is that it doesn't feel like an employee branding initiative. It feels like a peek into the company's culture, with all facts and no sugarcoating.

Do check out https://www.instagram.com/lastbench.studio/reels/, and particularly, the "30 days in 30 seconds" reels. I'm sure you'll agree with my takes here.

[murugappan]

Wrote the visual script for this tech explainer video.

Creative Direction by Raaj Rufaro and Animation by Niranjan Pramod.

[murugappan]

Wrote this quirky explainer video script for Aftershoot.

[murugappan]

Wrote and designed the narrative for this CSR video by Bosch India.

Concept and execution by Raaj Rufaro. Produced by LastBench Studio.

[murugappan]

Directed the new year campaign video for Times of India (2021)

Featuring snippets from Danish Sait, Yeddyurappa, and more.

[murugappan]

Putting on my designer hat

Me putting on my designer hat, metaphorically speaking:

I designed a bunch of statics for various purposes over the last one year with the intent of promoting them on Instagram. They're not award-winning or anything, but I think they're serviceable — even bordering on good — which is great, considering I'm primarily a writer.

And now, me literally putting on my designer hat:

[murugappan]

Screenwriting for a TV show

Between September-October 2020, I wrote 3 episodes for a Tamil show for AVM Productions under the guidance of Manoj Kumar Kalaivanan.