everything used to be just things.
AND THEN
SOMEONE MADE
AN
Most portfolios open with a résumé. Mine opens with a thank-you note. These ten ads got to me before I knew copy and brand strategy were jobs you could have. They’re the reason I started staring at ordinary things and asking who decided what they meant. So before a single piece of my own work, here are the ten that are the reason there’s any. Call it homage. I call it paying respect to the work that built me.
Ten films, one lesson, the whole of my job description: stare at the thing long enough until it confesses what it wants to mean.
Which is an annoying habit socially, and a useful one professionally.
why
start
here?
I could’ve opened with a wall of logos and a neat little “brands I’ve worked with” section.
But a logo on its own is just a shape with a paycheque.
What stays is stranger. A diamond that talked someone into a mood. A bib that argued sore legs had earned dessert. Boring little things that learned manners and stopped being boring.
That fascinated me years before I ever wrote a brief.
Brand strategy at its best is meaning-assignment dressed as commerce. You take the functional and slip a mirror behind it.
A snack becomes identity.
A phone becomes status.
A bangle becomes inheritance.
None of that lands by accident.
So that’s the job I’ve taken on: find the feeling the brief is too embarrassed to name, then build the words, the picture and the strategy until a stranger reading at a red light feels it too.
That’s the part I keep showing up for.
HI, I’M
ROHINI.
I make ads, and I’m unreasonably serious about it. Brand-strategy nerd, Chennai loyalist, soft for cinema, art, and anything a person clearly fussed over. I learned this trick early. Meaning hides inside boring little things. I’ve spent years getting better at calling it out on purpose. Hire me before somebody with better taste figures it out.
The city keeps
leaving ideas
in my way.
There is a signal on LB Road in Adyar that holds you for ninety seconds, red, non-negotiable. To my left, a loan-app hoarding trying very hard. To my right, a film poster half-peeled into something better than the designer intended. I am supposed to be thinking about where I am going. I am, instead, rewriting the loan-app line in my head before the light turns green.
This is most days. Me, my Vespa, the same roads with the occasional detour. To class. To a shoot. To a friend. To a film I have absolutely no business watching for the third time.
Yes, the third time. There is a short list of films I keep driving back to like they owe me money, and I will not be apologising for any of them.
Put a camera on any of this and you would get nothing. Red lights. Autos. A poster mid-peel. “Boring” is the honest word for it.
Except in my head it is never boring. It is a case study with no client and no deadline, running whether I asked it to or not.
I will admit it: I like the world you walk through more than the one you scroll through. A good outdoor line cannot be muted or skipped. It just stands there, fully committed, daring you to look away. I respect that more than I can reasonably explain at dinner.
Which is where doing it only in my head stopped being enough. I don’t want to keep rewriting the stranger who got the board. I want to be the reason someone else, on some other two-wheeler, stuck in this exact traffic, forgets to be annoyed for one whole second.
things I spotted on the way
If I’m this annoying about ads done by others, imagine me with an actual brief.
and when nobody
asks, I write anyway.
the obsession is cute. the work is where it has to pay rent.
the work
so far.
Briefs with budgets. Deadlines that did not care about my feelings. Opinions formed in rooms where someone could overrule me.
Open any one. You get the short version of what it was for, and the part I would only say out loud here.
before all this, I’ve been:
Not one of these jobs was glamorous. Every one of them is why I’ll be useful on day one, not month three.
Someone who has watched how the creative strategy and the ideas actually get executed, long before the case study gets written to flatter them.
I don’t want to
just make good ads.
I want to be an
ad woman.
That’s the line.
Not “in marketing”. Not “content”. And, with great respect, not “social media manager”. An ad woman. On purpose. Said out loud.
“Women supporting women” is, genuinely, my favourite genre. Which is exactly the problem with it. A genre is fiction. It makes a wonderful book, a better film, a I refuse to stop adding to. I have met it everywhere on a page and almost nowhere in a room where someone controlled the money.
So here is the take I keep being told to soften. The most useful feminism in this industry is not a panel, a pledge, or a soft-focus film every March. It is one woman with signing power hiring a woman with none, and never once posting about it. Solidarity that needs an audience is just marketing wearing our face.
Which makes this the actual ask, and I will be specific about it. If you build the rooms where the ads get made: I am not here for inspiration. I am here for a door, and I would like you to be the one who opens it.
Build the team where the people in the room are as good as the work that leaves it, and that is the job I’m auditioning for. Out loud. On purpose.
an offer
you might actually use.
What I bring: a worrying number of drafts, the ability to take a “no” on the chin, and a head that clocks hoardings before it clocks hashtags. What you bring: the years, the scars, and the first brutal read every draft of mine is begging for.
The deal is short. You get sharper work and someone who treats the unglamorous bits like the actual job.
Got room for someone who does the reading nobody assigned? Put me on the shortlist. Job, collaboration, mentorship, a long shot. I’m not precious about the label.
Or ignore the buttons entirely: rohinipkcreatives@gmail.com. I read it, I reply.
come on. you know where the email button is.
Hand me a boring little thingand a deadline.I’ll find the part peopleaccidentally care about.