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

Two years later, the move looks set to reshape GCPL’s approach to brand building in India, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The company’s Lightbox Creative Lab feeds creative campaigns for hair dye to air freshener brands around the world through an in-house team of about eight people.

In India, GCPL closed the accounts of agencies such as Creativeland Asia, Leo Burnett and JWT to consolidate all creative functions in-house. Creator is now the core of our business and is no longer a support function, the company said.

In FY25, Lightbox helped the company save 40 basis points on costs and increase creative accuracy.

The move was spearheaded by Sudhir Sitapati, managing director and CEO of GCPL, who believed the company had both the right size and culture to sustain an internal agency.

“Sudhir said: ‘Look, I’m taking this call. I want to do this because it felt like the right way to advertise for a company our size,'” said Ashwin Moorthy, head of global categories and head of marketing in India. Mint.

In the past, GCPL worked with multiple agencies, fragmented briefings, and inconsistent practices across geographies. This has slowed down the marketing ecosystem, made it inefficient, and weakened the power of our ideas. “We recognized the need to simplify, centralize and scale. We moved to a single-agency, global category model. This means we develop one central idea and then adapt it to each geography with local players, language and cues,” according to the company’s annual report for fiscal 2025.

“What unlocks this is consistency in brand storytelling. It allows us to speak with a unified voice globally while remaining locally relevant,” Moorthy said.

A&P Expenditures

Most large companies often work with a variety of agencies, including large media planning firms that manage advertising across TV, print, digital and outdoor platforms. Many 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 in-house.

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

In the 1990s, Lintas (now Lowe Lintas) was the exclusive agency for Hindustan Lever Ltd’s brands in India. The agency was initially a subsidiary of Unilever, HLL’s parent company. However, HUL is now working with different agencies for creative assignments.

In-house talent

Maker of Cinthol soaps and Godrej Expert hair dyes spent last financial year ₹1,369.21 crore in advertising and promotion at the consolidated level. More than 80% of this went to creative and production, with the rest directed to media buying. In FY25, the company reported consolidated revenues of: ₹14,364 crore.

Moorthy said it helps to have a group of creative hires within walking distance of the marketing team. Ideas are tested quickly without the need for additional layers of approval.

“We shortened the months of the campaign cycle because we cut down on unnecessary back-and-forth,” Moorthy said. Secondly, there is continuity. Once a creator works on a brand, he stays with it and the next movie is perfect. Third, costs have stabilized. “I used to spend two months a year negotiating agency fees. That’s gone now,” he added.

Lightbox’s in-house team consists of Swati Bhattacharya, who leads the vision. Bhattacharya was previously the creative head of FCB India. The team also includes chief creative strategist Gaurav Kumar, who was previously creative director of Leo Burnett. Godrej’s team includes Shalini Avadhani as chief creative strategist.

The team, comprising a total of 12 members, including visualizers and photographers, at the company’s Vikhroli office in Mumbai, produces around 35 campaigns annually for different categories.

Moorthy said this move adds more momentum to creative production. Stating that GCPL is one of the top 3 companies that spend the most on TV advertising in India, Moorthy said, “GCPL is running almost twice the campaigns we have run in FY22.”

Worldwide campaigns

GCPL derives approximately 38% of its business from international markets.

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

In Latin America, for example, GCPL launched its five-minute shampoo hair dye with a film built on the universal trope of “always late, friend.”

This analysis worked in markets in Argentina and went to Jakarta. The ad was soon remade for Indonesia before returning to India. “We tested the same movie in Indonesia from Spanish to Bahasa and re-shot it in Indonesia with local models,” he said.

In South Africa, the Lightbox team worked on hair dye brand Inecto with a culturally relevant campaign. “Women were saying they felt judged by the color of their skin. The team changed the narrative to ‘she will judge me by the color of my hair’ with fashion colors (pink, blue, red, etc.). This idea came from Lightbox in India, but resonated deeply in South Africa,” Moorthy said.

Goodknight, GCPL’s flagship household insecticide brand, has seen the benefit of leveraging an in-house team. The same writer wrote the scripts of four consecutive films; “This created a deep understanding of the brand,” he added.

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

Diversity and consistency

Brands are hiring third-party creative agencies to add different perspectives to their storytelling; This is something internal teams can overlook while focusing on consumers and go-to-market plans.

“Creative business is powered by diversity,” said Shantanu Sirohi, CEO of Interactive Avenues, the digital marketing arm of IPG Mediabrands.

“The agency’s role is to give your brand a stake in the consumer’s mind in this increasingly fragmented world; if that’s the goal, then I’m not sure outsourcing is best. You’re missing diversity.”

But Vani Gupta Dandia, managing partner of CherryPeachPlum Growth Partners, a business consulting firm, points out several advantages associated with running the creative agency in-house. “The whole process of creative development will definitely be much faster,” he said.

Dandia also pointed out that transparency in costs is an obvious advantage. “There’s a happy, opaque connection between creativity and production. Agencies get huge cuts from the production companies they pass on to the client. Secondly, with an in-house agency, clients can save on pitch fees. Assuming they pay a pitch fee, of course,” added Dandia.

It’s also not uncommon for advertising executives to move agencies; This can lead to some inconsistencies in the brand’s storytelling.

“Can an advertising agency be true brand custodians and consistently drive their brand assets forward? Yes, but only when teams are small, core team members stick around for long periods of time, and senior management on both sides have the maturity and business understanding of what it takes to build a brand over the long term,” he added.

Moorthy argues that GCPL still outsources media buying and production despite creative work being moved in-house. “They bring their own lenses and avoid ‘sameness’ between films,” he added.

For now, Lightbox’s playbook is pretty much “ready to go,” Moorthy said.

“The only risk is that we lose people. We need to give the creative team more leeway and make breakthroughs,” he said, adding that talent is the backbone of the practice.