From Skyrocket to Popcorn: Rachit Dewan's Next Chapter in Building Brand Stories

In a marketing world crowded with agencies chasing follower counts and viral spikes, Rachit Dewan has built his career on a different premise: that trust, not reach, is what actually moves a brand forward. This July, after building Skyrocket Media from scratch and turning it into a recognised name in influencer and experiential marketing, he stepped away to start something new. Popcorn Advertising Pvt Ltd is his second agency, and this time, he says, it was built to skip the mistakes that slow young agencies down.

A Career Built Before the Agency

Dewan's path into entrepreneurship did not begin with advertising. His career started in IT and SaaS solutions back in 2013, work that shaped how he later approached marketing: as something to be measured, structured, and held accountable, not just created. Over time, this grounding pulled him toward digital media and go-to-market execution, and he spent over 15 years moving through strategic leadership roles across business development, digital sales, and influencer marketing before stepping into entrepreneurship himself.

That mix of operational discipline and marketing instinct came together when he built Skyrocket Media from the ground up. Under his leadership, the agency ran nationwide, multi-city brand activations, developed commercial network models, and designed engagement frameworks for major FMCG, beverage, and retail brands. It became, in his words, a defining milestone of his career. But after taking Skyrocket to that scale, Dewan felt it was time to start again, this time with everything he had learned already built into the foundation.

Why He Started Again

Dewan is candid that Popcorn Advertising was not born from a single spark of inspiration but from years of watching the same gaps repeat themselves across the industry. The first was what he calls the obsession with top of the funnel numbers. Agencies, he noticed, were building influencer rosters around who had the biggest following rather than who actually held community trust, and brands were spending on one-off campaign spikes that left nothing behind once the post came down.

The second gap was structural. Influencer campaigns, offline activations, and digital storytelling were often run as separate efforts inside the same agency, with little coordination between them. Drawing on his SaaS background, Dewan pushed instead for a joined-up approach, one where online influence was designed to support measurable, on-ground impact rather than exist alongside it.

The third was what he describes as playbook fatigue: too many agencies applying the same formula to every client, with little accountability for whether it actually worked, layered on top of slow procurement cycles and opaque influencer pricing. Popcorn Advertising, he says, was built specifically to close these three gaps at once.

What Popcorn Advertising Actually Does

Popcorn positions itself as a full suite marketing partner spanning creative, digital, and experiential work. On the creative side, the agency handles branding, UI/UX, digital ad films, motion design, music production and licensing, and podcast production. On the talent and culture side, it runs data-backed influencer marketing, celebrity engagements, and meme marketing built around trend-driven, organic reach. And on the ground, it manages OOH and offline activations, full event production, and live event coverage.

What Dewan calls the agency's real differentiator is what he refers to as a "phygital" approach: the ability to connect a single campaign across digital content, influencer activity, meme amplification, and physical activations, rather than running each in isolation. That, paired with the operational discipline carried over from his SaaS years, is the pitch he is taking to brands: not just a vendor executing a brief, but a partner who ties creative work to a clear, measurable outcome.

Building In the Fixes From Day One

Rather than treat the challenges of running an agency as things to solve later, Dewan says he built Popcorn Advertising to avoid them from the outset. The procurement delays and cash flow bottlenecks that tend to choke growing agencies have been addressed upfront with standardised Service Level Agreements and commercial terms. Popcorn holds firmly to an eight percent agency fee, a deliberate decision to stay out of the price wars that erode margins and, in Dewan's view, quality along with them.

The full service stack, spanning creative, talent, and experiential work, was mapped and ready from launch rather than built up gradually. For Dewan, the real lesson from his years running Skyrocket was that services can always be copied by a competitor, but culture and operational discipline cannot. That is the part of Popcorn Advertising he says he has focused on protecting most.

The Turning Point

For Dewan, the real breakthrough behind Popcorn Advertising was not a single campaign or number but a realisation: that the phygital, integrated model he had been building at Skyrocket was working, and that brands and agency partners were placing real trust in it. He is quick to credit that trust rather than take sole ownership of the milestone. The brands willing to push boundaries with his team, and the agency partners who collaborated on data-driven influencer campaigns and secured brand mandates alongside him, were, in his account, what raised the bar for everything that came after. That confidence, he says, is what gave him the conviction to step away from Skyrocket and launch Popcorn Advertising fully prepared to scale from the first day.

Where Marketing Is Headed Next

Dewan is watching the shift toward AI closely, not as a threat to agencies but as a redefinition of what marketing work looks like. He expects routine campaign tasks such as bid adjustments, A/B testing, and audience refinement to increasingly run on autonomous systems, freeing professionals to focus on interpreting data and shaping strategy rather than pure execution.

He also expects the boundaries between marketing, sales, product, and customer experience to blur further as first-party data replaces third-party tracking, pushing agencies toward transparent, hyper-personalised engagement. Alongside this, he sees AR and VR moving from novelty to standard practice, with try-on experiences and lightweight VR demos becoming more common, and creators shifting from broadcasters into strategic collaborators working within tighter micro-communities. For Popcorn Advertising, the next five years are about combining that automation with the strategic and creative thinking that still has to come from people.

His Advice to New Founders

Asked what he would tell someone starting out in a saturated industry like his own, Dewan comes back to a few hard-earned principles. Know your value early and hold your ground on pricing, he says, rather than getting pulled into a race to the bottom that damages cash flow and, eventually, the quality of the work itself. Build a culture that cannot be copied, because while a service list or pitch deck can always be replicated, the trust and discipline behind them cannot. Set up operational rigour, clear SLAs, and standard commercial terms from day one rather than waiting until cash flow problems force the issue. And resist the pull of vanity metrics. Whatever the industry, he says, the businesses that last are the ones anchored to real, measurable impact rather than numbers that look good on a slide.

Closing Thoughts

Rachit Dewan's move from Skyrocket Media to Popcorn Advertising is less a fresh start than a second attempt built on everything the first one taught him. His approach, tying creative storytelling to on-ground results and refusing to compromise on either discipline or pricing, reflects a founder who has already seen what works and what does not. As brands continue to look for partners who can prove impact rather than just promise reach, Popcorn Advertising's phygital model may be well timed for where the industry is heading next.

Connect with Rachit Dewan on LinkedIn or follow him on Instagram for more on his journey and Popcorn Advertising's work.