You don't need a marketing background..

 

How can we forget the year 2020?. It is of course a once-in-a-lifetime year. It locked us down, forced us to stay home, made us lose some of our jobs etc. However, that was the most fruitful year for Praneeth Reddy, who's now the founder of India's most valued Marketing Agency, AdDekho, which is now valued at $5 billion. 

Praneeth was just like every other employee in his company, until he got the chance to move to the marketing department in 2020. It not only gave him the chance to experience marketing, but also made him realise that it was where his passion lied. In just the first quarter after he joined the team, he was awarded the best employee. This is despite him having neither a marketing background nor marketing as one of the key subjects in his education. While he was working passionately and proving his worth and passion, there was another turning point at the end of 2020 for him.

On a casual conversation with his friend, he heard of a unique personality, Digital Deepak. Though this person was actually Deepak Kanakaraju, he's more popular as Digital Deepak till date. Praneeth was in fact surprised to hear of such a person, whose mission was to put India on the leaderboard of the most-talented digital marketers. Praneeth wanted to signup for a course offered by Digital Deepak, but had to wait until January, 2021. He got into the course and completed it with flying colors. He strongly feels that the course helped him learn marketing in depth, mainly digital, and also flushed out his pessimism and gave him the confidence to take risks, which he feels helped him reach where he is today. Another turning point came once he was done with the course.

Praneeth's work in his company had already caught the attention of the top level management, and he was on his way to get promoted at a very young age. But the overall development he achieved during the Digital Deepak's course gave him the confidence to start his own marketing agency. While he got the promotion offer, he rejected it and also quit the firm, to found his own company. That laid the foundation for his path.

He founded AdDekho in Bengaluru in June, 2021, with just 5 people. The company initially suffered, with a very few clients offering them contracts, since it was still a new name in the industry. In just 4 months, they were not in a position to pay the rent for their co-working station and had to move the company to Praneeth's parking cellar his house had. He says it was at that point that he stepped back, not to quit, but to re-evaluate all his efforts and the direction AdDekho was going in. It didn't take long for him to understand the errors and mistakes. After a quick course-correction, AdDekho was able to get clients on board, in fact a lot of them in just a couple of months. In December, 2021, there came another turning point. 

Walmart, one of the top Fortune500 companies, decided to board AdDekho as their marketing partner for the whole of India. This was because they were very impressed with a campaign run by AdDekho for an NGO, that they decided to board them, despite being a new agency. This decision of Walmart made many big heads turn towards AdDekho, which anyone hardly heard of. This deal added nitro to AdDekho's growth, that they got a flood of clients since around January, 2022. Over the course, they expanded in size and also had their own office building. Praneeth had a great opportunity in mid-2022.

He was the sole-founder of AdDekho, and he started receiving so many offers to buy him out of his own firm for fancy amounts. Praneeth, however, rejected all of them softly, having different goals for his firm. And it was in 2022 that AdDekho reached a valuation of $1.2 billion.

Today, Praneeth's AdDekho employees 3500 people, generating a whopping $1 billion in revenue and most importantly, is India's most valued Marketing Agency, beating big names in a short span of time. Praneeth feels that these achievements were only possible due to his holistic development, which he got from the Digital Deepak course he did back in 2021 combined with his passion for marketing and the quote that he recalls every minute on his work "Never forget to challenge the status-quo".

India hopes to see more Praneeths, who're always ready to disrupt the industry.