Victorious team: a Q&A with six-time Loerie winners, INJOZI

By David Jenkin

The full-service agency took home six Loerie Awards for their work on Chicken Licken and Coronation in collaboration with Net#work BBDO, including two Craft Certificates, two Bronze and two Silvers.

So a bit of background – when and how did INJOZI get started? What has the journey been like?

Greg Russell: The journey has been really amazing. And I think quite facetted, which has kept it interesting.

Nick Argyros: We started about nine years ago, designing album artwork for our bands… I think we realised that we really loved being able to control everything we wanted to do creatively, from photography to design. Since then we’ve run a successful photography studio, done music production and built games.

In the last five years we’ve turned the music studios into a juggernaut with Audio Militia. Audio Militia now has eight studios between our Bryanston and Ferndale offices – and we’ve steadily grown the INJOZI team with developers, animators, designers and an amazing production team.

This year’s Loeries saw you guys taking home a string of awards – I’m sure that didn’t come out of the blue. To what do you attribute this success?

Argyros: It definitely didn’t come out of the blue for us. It’s taken us a long time to build the capabilities and understanding to pull off the work that ended up winning at the Loeries. Our game for Chicken Licken called SoulRocker took over four months to design and build - building our own gaming engine and AI components for the game.

Our Coronation website seems to be the first of its kind in South Africa and really is a beautiful piece of work. We have always prided ourselves on beautifully crafted and functional work.

Russell: We attribute it to our people. We all check our egos at the door and then work our asses off, every day. We’ve spent a lot of time refining our processes. And I know that everyone on the team is very clear on the vision of the agency and how they fit into that.

How did the team react to all these wins – I imagine some serious celebrations ensued?

Russell: Well, the first thing we did was stop at McDonald’s where we had a little parking lot party and hugged and high-fived, a lot. Then we went and drank our weight in champagne.

Argyros: True story. But I think it’s also created even more energy in our team, they’re inspired to do even bigger and better work now.

As a full-service agency there’s nothing off limits for you guys, but where would you say INJOZI’s greatest strengths lie?

Russell: I think that we’re exceptionally good at the craft side of things, which probably makes us dedicate more of our creative energy to our games, microsites, websites and activations. But recently we’ve found so much creativity in development, so our strength in artificial intelligence, bots and apps is increasing exponentially.

Is it ever challenging to keep creative thinking alive and healthy? Do you have any techniques to achieve that?

Argyros: We’re lucky because creativity is an intrinsic part of our culture, so it is always alive and healthy. We sometimes think it comes fairly easy because we’re constantly exercising it. Not to say there aren’t any challenges, but at heart,INJOZI is about people with great ideas who want to do creative things in exciting new ways, so it’s not really about some secret technique, it is just part of our DNA.

How does the future look for INJOZI?

INJOZI: We’re very excited about the future. We’ve worked extremely hard at getting our name out there and it’s really paying off now, which is great. We’re particularly optimistic about some of our own products that we’re launching this year, which we’ll be sharing very soon.

For more information, visit www.injozi.biz. Alternatively, connect with them on Facebook or on Twitter.