Are awards Fundamental?

We have been asked more than once—if someone from Fundamental is on jury duty at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2025, why has the agency chosen not to enter work at the event? To answer this, we would like to quote an incredibly wise man none of us will ever have the pleasure of knowing.

Confucius once said that when everything is your focus, nothing is your focus.

Independent agencies in 2025 have the opportunity, the liberty, and we daresay, the responsibility to craft their calling cards. And to do so with confident brushstrokes that are uniquely theirs—why go the indie way otherwise, right?

When we started Fundamental, we decided to grab this opportunity for customisation with both hands. We determined what our USP is, the strengths that we want to grow on the back of, where we want to go and at what pace we want to get there. Ours isn’t a shared timetable simply because we are not in the same race as most others.

This clarity has guided our choices and simplified our decision-making. It has also informed our collective understanding and parsing of weighty words like reputation, recognition, and fame. Words that every organisation aspires to and rightly so. Who wouldn’t? But words that aren’t binary concepts.

What one is reputed or famous for needn’t be identical to what someone else is reputed or famous for. This is why we’ve taken a considered call to not enter award shows so far.

We are up to speed with work that is being celebrated both in our market and globally. We frequently debate a lot of the pieces, admire some of them and are indifferent to others. Above all, we respect the sweat, the fervour and the love that goes into making metal happen.

That being said, it’s just not Fundamental's game right now. We have all been there and played that. But like we said, when we took the plunge to fly solo we had the opportunity to build a calling card from scratch-and that’s precisely what we are doing.

The pursuit of awards (and yes, it is a conscious chase; let no one pretends otherwise, although almost everyone does) is a complete workstream unto itself. For the chase to fructify, it needs time, manpower, commitment, resilience, money, and any other resource you can think of. And it needs all of the above in spades.

More power to those who have opted in, we may well be in their midst someday. But, if and when we do, we will go all in, like we are right now — in the pursuit of what we think is best for us today.

We believe that at this stage in our lifecycle, our resources need to be deployed toward building a rock-solid, enduring system that is respected, recognised, and well-regarded, even without collecting gongs along the way. We feel we are poised to achieve a distinction. And as for the future, it’s like what Scarlett O’Hara said: Tomorrow is another day.

Here is what's non-negotiable to us in the 'here and now' parameters we have chosen to live and die by, in the first few years of our existence.

Staying lean: Stature, not scale is what we are after. Take a look at our work and you will know what we mean. When you have a tight, sharp team of people who punch above their weight, good (and sometimes great) results write themselves.

Profitability: When you have the aforementioned set of people, you respect the fact that they need to earn well. So, where we come from, salaries are paid on time and increments happen when they are supposed to. Two years down, we are already running our second increment cycle. And we are talking substantial, merit-based numbers here—not token amounts just so we could pen this article with a semi-clear conscience. As we write this, our attrition rate is zero.

Word-of-mouth: The kind that gets us into high-stakes conversations that shape brand trajectories. The sort of conversations that don’t open up even to agencies who have been around forever and three months.

Value over volume: We are not amuse bouche; we are the entree. And once people work with us, they know that.

One look at the above parameters and the logic behind our decision to not enter should be crystal clear. We believe that these building blocks are what we need to set in stone first and before all else. Accolades to us also mean that clients keep coming back for more. And this, without fuss and fanfare.

Our MO has been formed on the back of the lived professional experiences of the leadership team and the gaps in our industry that we see and hope to fill. So, if we were to make highfalutin statements about carving a niche and then go about doing exactly what everyone else does at exactly the same time in the same manner, well, then we are just a bunch of gasbags, aren’t we?

— Nishant Saurabh, CEO, Fundamental (L) and Pallavi Chakravarti, CCO, Fundamental (R)