Advertising industry legend Piyush Pandey passed away on Friday at the age of 70. Bauddhayan Mukherji , founder of Little Lamb Films, shares his memories of working with the icon for a quarter of a century.
Piyush Pandey played the biggest role in making Indian advertising speak the language of the common man. Before his time, English was the predominant language of Indian advertising. It was the man from Rajasthan, who joined Ogilvy & Mather as a trainee client servicing executive in 1982, shifted to the creative side and rose to become the agency’s chief creative officer worldwide and executive chairman in India, who pulled advertising out of the grasp of south Bombay.
The Cadbury Dairy Milk ad that shot him into prominence in 1994 could well have featured a jingle in English, which it originally did. But it was due to his vision that “Kuchh Khaas Hai” was also written in Hindi and recorded with Shankar Mahadevan. The ad in Hindi went on to make the dancing girl a household figure and changed consumer perception about chocolates being only for children. Once Hindi was accepted as the language of national campaigns, there was a tectonic shift — the stories changed, so did the casting of Indian advertising films. No longer were agencies on the lookout only for fair, urban models with chocolate boy and girl looks. The focus shifted to common men and women.
The Piyush-Prasoon (younger brother) jugalbandi — with Prasoon as filmmaker and Piyush as the creative head — has produced memorable campaigns such as Fevicol. The two brothers together won the Lion of St Mark — the lifetime achievement honour given at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the most prestigious advertising award show. That was a first in advertising history at Cannes.
On a personal note, I owe my shift to Mumbai indirectly to Piyush. When I started out in 1998 at Black Magic, run by Arjun Gourisaria and Abhijit Chaudhuri, we were based out of Calcutta and working on top-level national brands. Soon we became Ogilvy’s go-to production house. One day, Piyush told Arjun that although he understood that we were one flight away, as Arjun used to tell him, he needed us to be one phone call away. That conversation made us all shift base and dream bigger.
In 2001, when we made the Asian Paints “Har Ghar Chup Chap Se Kuchh Kehta Hai” ad, we were looking for a voice. We tried many, including his younger brother Prasoon, the other Prasoon, Joshi (lyricist and screenplay writer)…. Finally Piyush came to our rescue and lent his voice and the client loved his rendition. It became one of the legendary commercials in Indian advertising and his voice became familiar in every household.
A few years later, we did a campaign on the stigma faced by HIV-affected women for Breakthrough, an international human rights organisation. Then a young director, I approached him with a request to do the voice-over. I went to meet him with Emmanuel Upputuru, the creative director on the project. Piyush loved the offline (first cut) and agreed. On the day of the dubbing at Prime Focus, before entering the recording booth, I asked him with much trepidation: “Sir, ek se zyada take denge toh? (Sir, will you give more than one take)?”
He turned to me and said: “Abbey, tu director hai. Kitne take chahiye tu bata, main karunga. (Hey, you are the director. You tell me how many takes you need. I will do it.)” That gesture by a legend of the industry put a young, anxious director so much at ease!
At Black Magic, we worked on innumerable campaigns for O&M — Castrol, Ponds, ICICI USAID, Anchor. One of my biggest learnings came from Piyush at a pre-production meeting in those days. A client asked how long the film would be. In those days, ad films were typically 45-60 seconds long. Now it has come down to 15-20 seconds. As I mulled what length I should commit, Piyush shot back: “Yeh kahani bolne mein jeetna time lagega, lagega.”
That made me realise that nothing is more important than the story and you have to give it that much time. I have used that line of his so many times later in life after I moved out of Black Magic and opened my own production house (Little Lamb Films) 18 years ago.
The trust that clients had in his judgement was unbelievable. At every presentation with Ogilvy, when we screened a film, we would be asked if Piyush had seen it. If we said he had liked the film, it was enough to remove their doubts. The film would fly with the clients. Indeed, in everything we did, from the script to the final cut, we were always on the lookout for Piyush’s blessings, even after he stepped down as executive chairman of Ogilvy India in 2023 and took on an advisory role. His mind was as sharp as a razor and he understood the pulse of the people better than anybody else in the industry.
Another lesson he taught me was when he sought my own evaluation of a film I had made. He could sense I was not satisfied. On hearing me out, he said: “Remember, good advertising is not about winning awards. Not every film will bring you a trophy. But an ad film has to do the job it is supposed to. Only then it is good advertising.”
One of my biggest rewards was the hug he gave me on coming off stage after accepting the gold Abby Award at Goafest 2009 for the Bell Bajao campaign on domestic violence that I had directed for Ogilvy. He told me it was one of his favourite campaigns.
There was more to Piyush than advertising. He had represented Rajasthan at the Ranji Trophy level as a wicketkeeper-batsman. But not many know, he was also a sculptor. In 2005, my wife Mona (Monalisa Mukherji, currently executive producer at Little Lamb Films) had arranged a cricket match between the production companies housed in Famous Studios (an iconic address at Mahalaxmi housing White Light, Big Picture and Equinox) and those like Corcoise, our Black Magic, which were not.
We called the teams InFamous and OutFamous. The Ogilvy office was across the road from the field, in Kamala Mills Compound. While the first match was underway, Piyush came over carrying a crate of beer. Grabbing a chair, he told us: “What will I do in the office when all my directors are playing here?” He had brought something else: a padded-up Ganesha holding a bat. He had sculpted the piece himself. While leaving, he left it with us, saying it would be his gift to the man of the match. If I remember correctly, Shoojit Sircar won it. (The Telegraph confirmed with the Piku and Vicky Donor director that it was indeed him.)
It is difficult to describe today’s loss in words. There was magic in the name Piyush Pandey, which has vanished with his passing. As a young assistant director seated across the table, I used to marvel at his regal moustache. It was the most iconic in our fraternity next to that of the Air India Maharaja. Befittingly so. Piyush Pandey was the Maharaja of Indian advertising.
As told to Sudeshna Banerjee