Grazitti Interactive – Marketing for Digital Natives – How We Chose Our Name And Tagline

In an interview with Business Standard, Nikesh Arora – the sales genius extraordinaire of Google (or as the author calls him – the fourth musketeer),outlined that the best of the digital revolution was yet to come! And defined how children were the real digital natives – having not seen a world outside of Google and Facebook.

My son started playing games on the computer before he learnt how to spell! In fact he learnt spelling from the games he played. One of our earliest memories is of him banging on the keyboard and wondering why nothing flashed on the screen – this was before he was a year old! True sign of a native – innate sense of what to expect from technology, irrespective of the age.

When we started Grazitti^™ – we had two drivers – we were building a company that leveraged the new digital era we were entering! Since this new world was driven by completely different set of behaviors than previously possible – we wanted to be at the cutting edge of marketing – and even though we ourselves are immigrants – we were building a company that talks for the native! Heck as the US shows – immigrants are always attracted by the Natives! The exact term – we owe to Bhavish Sood, Gartner Director –– who has morphed from a colleague to one of the more respected folks we are happy to call friend.

As we started, our first customer was a visionary who came from an older domain – the printing industry – but also extremely conscious of his role as a mentor to an entire industry that needs to change to meet changing role of print service providers to marketing service providers. We are grateful to you Rab for trusting us with your web presence. Over the years we have been privileged to work on technologies that are defining the age of digital natives– whether it be web, mobile, or cloud for customers both with physical and virtual products and services.

As a company we have had the privilege of having great employees who have helped us live to our promise – each one of them has contributed to our success and continued focus on winning our customers confidence and trust. And most of these folks are also natives – having grown up with the internet in their school years.

I was privileged to have used social media to drive lead generation for a customer very early on in the social media explosion and it was clear that this was going to be the form of marketing that was most important! The second driver for our vision was the explosion of self-expression – on social media – Facebook, blogs – sort of web graffiti! Our name is a play on this very word – and we were lucky to find something that matched our conception! There too we have been lucky to work with the major automotive and innovative brands to reach audiences mining social intentions and “web graffiti”. We have been lucky to have folks like Heather and Phil and all the good folks at Marketo who trust us with their community.

Thanks to Rab for trusting us, Heather and Phil for believing in us, Bhavish for helping us get a focus, and Nikesh for a succinct validation of our ambition. We owe a lot of what we do to partners like S Ghosh – who asks us to love our customers and get our customers to love our work, and Ben Allen – who holds a torch for us in Seattle.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our customers, employees, friends and well-wishers!