Piyush Pandey: The Man Behind Brand Bharat

WHEN PIYUSH PANDEY was in St Xavier’s School, Jaipur, he started playing cricket, travelling the country for tournaments, with train journeys as long as 48 hours sometimes, the cry of “chai chai” replaced by “kapi kapi” as he went from north to south. He continued playing for college (“I was the only one to do cricket honours,” he jokes), and then the Ranji Trophy for his state, Rajasthan.

The journeys in unreserved, second-class compartments, with the window open to breathe in the changing air, the ro­mance of the stations, hot puri aloo, and the diverse passengers ready to share their dabbas gave him an understanding of India that nothing else could equal. “I know modernisation is good for us but nostalgia is good for me,” says Pandey, now 68. As a boy, he would accompany his father in his jeep as he drove from village to village, lending and collecting funds from the cooperative bank. It gave him an ease across cultures. From playing with the village boys to eating whatever the farmers did, his cultural imagination was enriched beyond measure.

Perhaps destiny was preparing him for his greatest innings, at the helm of the advertising agency Ogilvy, where he has been work­ing for 41 years, where he was finally made an adviser, his retire­ment as chairman global creative and executive chairman starting January 1, 2024, sending a ripple of regret through a community of media, marketing agencies, advertising firms, and scores of clients who have watched a legend being born.

Piyush Pandey is the man who brought Bharat to India in the world of advertising at a time when it was domi­nated by print advertising and Anglo­phone copywriters who often didn’t even understand the translations. But it wasn’t just the use of Hindi to sell products. It was also the use of subtle humour that transformed brands and revived products. For Pandey, every product had to connect with the con­sumer through emotion. Asian Paints was not merely a paint, but a part of what your home said about you, hence the tagline, “Har ghar kuch kehta hai”. Fevicol was not merely about fixing broken things but about unbreakable bonds, embodied by the ad that had two teams playing tug of war. Similarly, Cadbury was not a chocolate merely for children but a celebratory sweet for every occasion, symbolised by “Kuch khas hai hum sabhi main”, and the young woman dancing on the ground when her significant other scored a boundary.

Irreverence was reflected in Pandey himself. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, always emphasising the teamwork of his col­leagues and the care of his mentors. Ask him about any of his work, and he is quick to credit others. The “Dum laga ke haisha” Fevicol ad has a chorus by friends, such as KK Raina and Vijay Kashyap, with Rajkumar Hirani playing the narrator, all working for free. At St Stephen’s where he studied history as an undergraduate and postgraduate, he was fortunate to be in the same class as senior bureaucrats Amitabh Kant and Rajiv Mehrishi. “Shashi Tharoor was a year senior. S Jaishankar was a few years senior. It was great to learn from these people,” says Pandey, especially as he was coming from a childhood rich with the sights and sounds of Bharat. The cosmopolitan air of St Stephen’s gave him a flamboyance but he never lost the earthy simplicity of Rajasthan, growing up among nine children of artistically generous parents.

It was one of his siblings he turned to when he decided to try his luck in advertising (it had to be with the best, Ogilvy) after three years in Kolkata with a tea company. Ila Arun, his singer-actor sister, was staying in Santa Cruz, a flat she continues to live in. “I would have never been able to make it in Mumbai without her,” he says.

And make it he did, going from one iconic campaign to another. There was Fevicol, Asian Paints, Cadbury. In 1988, he wrote the lyrics for ‘Mile sur mera tumhara’. His boss, Suresh Mullick, okayed the 18th draft and it became an anthem for India’s unity in diversity. Later, he wrote four magic words “Do boond zindagi ki” and transformed pub­lic service advertising forever. It didn’t have to be boring, didactic, or pompous. It could be simple, delivered in Amitabh Bachchan’s famous baritone, and it could help eradicate polio from India.

And he also radically altered po­litical advertising, focusing on one man who would be the messenger of “achche din”. “Arun Jaitley showed us data that indicated quite clearly that Mr Modi’s ratings were higher than that of BJP. We knew what we had to do,” says Pandey. “Achche din aane wale hain” and “Abki baar Modi sarkar” became the hope that would deliver India from an age of dynasty, corruption, and fractiousness. In 2019, he made it even more personality-oriented. “Modi hai to mumkin hai”, said his campaign for BJP in 2019.

And in 2024? “They haven’t asked me yet,” he says but adds he will do it in a heartbeat. He doesn’t do more than one political party at a time. “I am not Prashant Kishor,” he laughs, referring to the stra­tegic political adviser.

In many ways, Pandey is a product of his times, growing up in advertising just as Indian entertainment was becoming part of everyone’s daily landscape. Colour television came to everyone’s homes in 1982 and brands realised the value of Hindi. TV reached the homes of people and ad agencies had to understand the lan­guage they spoke. Some people thought it was beneath their dig­nity to write copy in Hindi, says Pandey, but he thought of it as an opportunity. “I wanted to make meaning for people, delight them by communicating in their cultural language,” he says.

Contemporary advertising and its mindless use of celebrities do not excite him. The discredit goes to startups blowing up other people’s money, he says. They are paying celebrities from their CSR account, he jokes. Their films are not doing well, so these ads sus­tain them, he elaborates. It’s so bad that it has even put him off his beloved cricket. “I couldn’t watch IPL matches this time because of the ads,” he complains. “You remember the photos of half-clad women at liquor shops in the past, which had a lot of men hanging around. Celebrity ads currently remind me of that,” he says.

What excites him are simpler things—that Madhya Pradesh Tourism has stuck with the soul of the first ad he wrote for them 18 years ago, despite changes in officials and politicians. “Taali do haatho se bajti hain (you can only clap with both hands),” he says. “You can’t do great work when egos come in, and when officials waste public money by thinking they want their own stamp on things and start fixing things that aren’t broken.” A case in point is the campaign he did for Rajasthan, which was quirky but fell foul of the Ashok Gehlot government in 2018.

His car is a Range Rover and he has two homes now, both by the sea, one in Shivaji Park, Mumbai, and another in Goa, which he shares with his self-taught architect wife Nita and their five dogs, but he remains the young man who joined Ogilvy all those years ago, ready to roll up his sleeves and write copy. In his new role, he may now have to merely applaud sometimes, and at other times, be a good coach, but the thrill of seeing an emotion connect with the audience will never go away. “Ogilvy is my work, my hobby, my joy,” he says. “I am going nowhere.”

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