Trailblazer who rewrote ad grammar with wit, local tropes and a Hindi heart

On August 15, 1988, soon after the Prime Minister’s customary speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort in New Delhi, Doordarshan, then the sole TV channel in India, ran an advertisement promoting national integration.

- Shuchi Bansal

It was more music video than ad film, with music composed by Bhimsen Joshi and arranged by Louis Banks. The video was produced by Suresh Mullick, the creative head of Ogilvy and Mather (also the man who, made Mozart's 25th Symphony a recognisable tune in India by using it as the background music for a Titan watches ad), and the lyrics of the song, Mile Sur Mere Tumara (Our tunes merge), were written by an account manager in the agency's Bombay office.

The same year, the man moved to the agency’s creative department; by 1991, he was creative director; and by 1994, national creative director. His name was Piyush Pandey, and before he joined O&M in 1982, he had been a professional cricketer (representing Rajasthan in the Ranji Trophy; he was a wicket-keeper/batsman) and teataster. He studied history at St Stephens College, Delhi.

In 2004, Pandey was made executive chairman of Ogilvy India, and in 2019, he was named the agency's worldwide creative chief. He transitioned to the role of an advisor to the agency in 2024 and remained on the Ogilvy Worldwide Creative Council. But what that steep career graph does not highlight is how Pandey, who passed on to that great billboard in the sky on Friday morning, changed Indian advertising.

He did this by making it Indian.

Not that others had not done so in the past Alyque Padamsee did it famously with the value-conscious Lalitaji for Surf (Lintas) in the 1980s and not that Ogilvy under Pandey steered clear of the Western sensibility that permeated advertising hack then (if not in themes, then definitely in execution) as evident in the Vodafone pug or the Dairy Milk dancer; only no one did it as consistently, and as well, as he did.

By doing so, he created an Indian idiom for advertising that has now become the norm.