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.

NEW YORK/ NEW DELHI June 12, 2026 — DoubleVerify (“DV”) (NYSE: DV), the leading software platform to verify media quality, optimize advertising performance and prove campaign outcomes, today announced the launch of AI-powered brand suitability reporting for YouTube Audio Ads campaigns, extending DV’s trusted post-bid measurement capabilities to this listening-first format.

As advertisers increasingly allocate dedicated budgets to audio environments, the need for transparency and control continues to grow. With brand suitability reporting for YouTube Audio Ads campaigns, DV helps customers confidently expand into this media category, applying consistent standards and gaining the visibility needed to drive stronger performance.

“As audio consumption continues to grow, advertisers need the same level of transparency and control they expect across the broader digital ecosystem,” said Steven Woolway, EVP of Business Development at DoubleVerify . “With AI-powered brand suitability measurement, we’re extending the same trusted insights advertisers rely on for video into audio-forward environments, giving our customers the transparency and control needed to protect brand equity while scaling investment with confidence.”

YouTube Audio Ads are designed for listening-first experiences, running as in-stream ads with lightweight creative, typically a static image or simple animation paired with high-quality audio. These ads appear across environments where users are more likely to listen than watch, including YouTube Music, podcast content on YouTube and other audio-forward inventory.

As audio becomes a more intentional part of media plans, it introduces a new layer of complexity for brand suitability. Without proper post-bid measurement, advertisers risk limited visibility into potential misalignment between their brand and the audio content surrounding their ads.

DV’s brand suitability reporting for YouTube Audio Ads is powered by Universal Content Intelligence, DV’s AI-powered classification engine that analyzes content across audio, video, text and image signals to deliver precise, scalable classification. In audio-forward environments, DV applies advanced AI models to interpret spoken language, sentiment, contextual cues and metadata. This multi-signal approach enables more accurate identification of nuanced content, ensuring brand suitability standards are consistently applied.

DV’s brand suitability offering is a key component of DV’s Media AdVantage Platform, which combines media verification, ad performance optimization and campaign outcomes measurement to maximize media effectiveness and return on ad spend. As part of media verification, DV’s brand suitability measurement provides advertisers with actionable insights into content alignment, strengthening confidence in campaign performance.

DV recently announced the launch of DV AI SlopStopper for Social, expanding protection against low-quality, AI-generated content and helping advertisers maximize media quality and campaign performance across social environments.