Crayons started in Delhi in 1986, when the industry said that was the wrong city and independence was the wrong model.

Four decades later, it is one of the largest fully independent advertising agencies in the country.

The Crayons Network today marked forty years in business – forty years since Kunal Lalani founded the agency in July 1986 from a basement office in New Delhi, at a time when the Indian advertising industry was concentrated almost entirely in Bombay, and when the conventional wisdom held that a truly independent, homegrown agency could not compete with the multinational networks. Crayons has spent four decades proving that wrong.

The First Bet

The first real test came early, with Baba Zafrani Zarda. The brand was a chewing tobacco product – a category that Doordarshan, then India’s only television broadcaster, flatly refused to carry. Crayons took the campaign to cinema halls and VHS instead. The film was shot at a casino in Nepal and featured Bollywood star Vinod Khanna. It achieved near-total recall across every format it ran in. The campaign worked, spectacularly. And Crayons had learned its first lesson early, that the right idea finds its audience.

Building the Network — City by City

Expansion diverged from advertising logic, Crayons started by going to markets where agencies didn’t typically go to first. Starting with Chandigarh in 1996. Jaipur, Mumbai, Lucknow, Chennai and Kolkata followed shortly after. In 2006, Crayons crossed another border altogether by opening in Dubai to serve the GCC region.

Growth brought different kinds of work.

Tourism became one of the agency’s defining strengths. From Kerala Tourism to the Incredible India’s first global digital campaign, Crayons has worked with over a dozen state tourism boards.

Integration followed. In 2011, Crayons expanded beyond the traditional agency model with specialist media, digital, OOH and events businesses. Melon Media, Ultraviolet Digital, Amber OOH, and Jade Events gave clients all the capability under a single independent roof.

More recently came some of the country’s biggest brands. From Air India’s historic return to the Tata Group to the Tata Group’s social media mandate itself.

Today, Crayons counts Air India, Tata, ITC, Kajaria, Fortis healthcare, APL Apollo and The Leela Hotels among the brands that have shaped its journey, alongside partnerships with public institutions, financial services, healthcare leaders and more than ten state governments.

Going Public, Staying Independent

In May 2023, Crayons listed on the NSE SME – a step that gave the agency access to capital markets without giving up the independence that built it. The IPO was oversubscribed 147 times.

The 40th Anniversary

The milestone was marked with a day-long leadership summit in Delhi. With branch heads and department leads from across the network, a full day focused on the years ahead. The agenda centred on Crayons’ continued investment in technology, AI, and integrated communications capabilities that extend what an independent agency can deliver.

The summit was followed by a celebration that, by all accounts, reflected the agency’s character: large, earned, and entirely its own.

Jessica Apellaniz is Wieden+Kennedy México’s first Chief Creative Officer, brought in to help build the agency—and its point of view—from the ground up when the office opened in México City in 2023. She oversees all creative work across the office, partnering with brands like Nike, Ford, Uber, and AB InBev to make ideas that show up in culture.

Before W+K, Jessica was CCO for Latin America at Ogilvy, where she led teams across the region and helped deliver award-winning work for clients including Coca-Cola, KFC, Mondelez, Mazda, American Express, Nestlé, and more. Her leadership contributed to Cannes Lions, D&AD, and One Show wins, as well as to Ogilvy Latin America being named Regional Network of the Year in 2022.

Jessica’s path into creativity started behind the scenes as a producer, including a stint at MTV LATAM, before she moved into copywriting and never looked back. As one of the few women leading creative at a regional level in Latin America—and a mother of two—she’s focused on building teams that reflect the real world and pushing the industry toward a more balanced, inclusive future.