Built on the belief that comfort is the enemy of creativity, MagicCircle has evolved into a fast-moving creative collective driven by curiosity, experimentation, and a healthy fear of irrelevance. Through Restless@MagicCircle, the agency is embracing creative vulnerability, cultural agility, and unconventional thinking to create work designed for attention-deficit audiences and rapidly shifting platforms.

Let’s be completely honest for a second. Most agency write-ups are safe, meticulously sanitised, and wrapped in enough corporate buzzwords to make you lose your mind.

Hemant Misra

We aren’t going to do that.

Instead, we’re going to talk about a feeling every agency professional knows but hides. Imposter syndrome. We suffer from it daily. We are constantly paranoid about becoming irrelevant, and quite frankly, it’s the best thing that has ever happened to our work.

When we started as MagicCircle in 2018, we proved we could build massive, insight-driven, iconic brands like MakeMyTrip, Zomato, PolicyBazaar, Hindware and more. But by late 2024, the traditional ad landscape felt like a creative straightjacket. Attention spans fractured, social retainers died, and standard templates became useless. So, we blew up the old model and formed Restless@MagicCircle. A tight creative collective built to move fast.

To tell you how we function, we grilled ourselves. No filters. So, let’s get cooking.

The responses below were shared collectively by the MagicCircle leadership team, comprising Hemant Misra, founder and MD; Dheeraj Renganath, co-founder and CCO; Ashit Chakravarty, associate partner and COO; Shray Chawla, executive creative director (copy); Akshit VS, executive creative director (art) and Angira Lahiri, executive planning director.

If things were going fine, why become ‘restless’?

Because comfort breeds terrible, boring advertising. The comms ecosystem changes fast. The minute an agency feels secure, its work becomes formulaic. Our imposter syndrome keeps us aggressively awake. That persistent fear of irrelevance is our fuel. It forces us to ditch the safe, client-pleasing briefs and chase edgier, conversational ideas that actually make people stop scrolling. If our work doesn’t make us slightly nervous, it’s not ready.
 
How do you manage a room full of paranoid, restless creatives?

To begin with, you challenge the notion that they need to be managed. They need to be nurtured. You encourage people to bring their obsessions, instincts, experiences and anxieties into work every day.

Next, you start to look beyond titles. Designation neutrality was the bare minimum our culture demanded. Flexible ways of working. Open pitching. The freedom to contribute beyond your role. Space to challenge, collaborate and fail. That’s the workplace we’re building. Creative freedom isn’t a poster on our wall. It’s an operational reality. Because restlessness only exists when there are no shackles.

You openly admit to creative vulnerability. Isn’t that risky?

Pretending to be infallible is bad for business. Just look at the internet today. Users can instantly compare and call out work. Given the volume of content today, it is impossible to track every ad on earth. If a creative coincidence happens, our policy is radically transparent. We stay vulnerable, acknowledge it, and openly credit the original creator. That honesty is deeply tied to our Indian roots. An ecosystem built on community trust and rapid adaptation. When our peers make brilliant work, we don’t get bitter. We experience a healthy, restless jealousy that forces us to push ourselves harder.
 
What’s your biggest pet peeve with the current client dynamic?

The speed to act on bold ideas. Or lack thereof. Incredible, culture-jacking opportunities die every single day because a brand is stuck in an endless loop of approvals. We aren’t here to bash clients, though. We work with many partners who move decisively and understand that culture doesn’t wait for complex review cycles.

We’re also deeply empathetic to the systemic issues that can slow decision-making inside large organisations. But an agency is only as brave as the ideas a client will back. Therefore, we actively seek partners with the conviction and agility to act in real time, so we can co-create genuinely entertaining and effective work.
 
Before we sign off, here’s one last restless thought. Maybe imposter syndrome isn’t that bad after all. Maybe feeling slightly uncomfortable every-freaking-day is the point. Because the day you stop questioning your instincts, stop experimenting, stop feeling that tiny bit of nervousness before putting work out, might just be the day your work starts looking like everybody else’s. And honestly? That scares us a lot more.

Click here to see MagicCircle's work.

This article was part of a special focus on Indian independent creative companies circulated alongside Manifest's June issue, which can be bought here.

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