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. Copywriter, 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.
Naturally, this makes me terrible company at traffic signals.
Most days, it’s me, my Vespa, and Chennai.
Same roads, give or take a detour. To class. To a shoot. To a friend. To a film I have absolutely no business seeing a third time. (I love films, embarrassingly. ten of them, below.)
If you filmed it, it would look like nothing. Red lights. Autos. Half-peeled posters.
In my head, it’s a case study.
I clock which boards changed this week, and which ones are still wasting their rent. I catch headlines trying too hard, and the rare one that lands stupidly perfect. Shutters with hand-painted type. Shopfronts in four fonts that somehow work. Bus backs that had no right to.
I like the world you walk through more than the one you scroll past. A good outdoor line just stands there and dares you to ignore it.
So just looking stopped being enough. I don’t only want to look up at someone else’s line. I want some stranger on a two-wheeler, stuck in my exact traffic, to accidentally read a line I wrote, and remember it on the next ride.
things I spotted on the way
If I’m this annoying about ads done by others, imagine me with an actual brief.
Once you start rewriting hoardings in your head, eventually you start writing to the rooms you want to walk into.
ok. there’s this agency.
Bangalore. Built by people who left a very successful agency to make a kinder one. More than a fifth of it is owned by the people who actually do the work. The entire staff handbook is public on Notion, the awkward bits included, because they’d rather argue in the open than keep pretending agencies are fine.
The whole mission is four words: do great work, get great sleep. An agency that admits both halves of that are hard is an agency I’d reshuffle my life around. Swiggy, Tanishq, Britannia walk through that door. I would like to be standing in the room when they do.
So I didn’t sit around hoping a careers page took pity on me. I wrote a film, shot it, cut it, and sent it to them. Cold.
Nobody asked. That was the whole idea.
if you’re fromand you’ve read this far: hello. you know where to find me.
before anyone asked▶ press playthe 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. This is the doing, not the showreel.
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 decisions actually get made, 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 my favourite genre. I have run into it far more in books and shows than in rooms where the money is. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo let a woman be ruthless, adored, right, and win anyway. I would like to see that combination on a payroll.
Right now, “ad woman” is a working theory in my life: a genre, , a set of screenshots. I’d like it to be a job description.
If you’re building a team where the people are as good as the portfolio, that’s the job I’m auditioning for.
an offer
you might actually use.
Hire the one who’ll care more than is strictly professional.
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: rohinisripk@gmail.com. I read it, I reply.
Especially if you’re an Indian woman already inside these buildings: I’m trying to get to your side of the table. I’ve started turning up around communities like Indian Creative Women ↗; I’d love to learn from the people who built them.
come on. you know where the email button is.
if this made you think “she might be useful on a brief,” excellent. that was the ad working.
Hand me a boring little thing
and a deadline.
I’ll find the part people
accidentally care about.