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This article looks at the life and legacy of Piyush Pandey (1955–2025), the Executive Chairman of Ogilvy India and Worldwide Chief Creative Officer, widely regarded as the father of Indian advertising. It traces his journey from Jaipur to Ogilvy, where he transformed the language of Indian advertising by grounding it in everyday idioms, humour, and cultural familiarity. The piece outlines how his campaigns for Fevicol, Cadbury’s 'Kuch Khaas Hai', and Asian Paints’ 'Har Ghar Kuch Kehta Hai' redefined how brands communicate with Indian audiences.
When ad man Piyush Pandey, a young boy from Jaipur turned down tea-tasting for a career in ideas, nobody envisioned that the 27-year-old who joined Ogilvy & Mather India in 1982 would emerge as its Executive Chairman India and Worldwide Creative Officer and later come to be known as the 'father of Indian advertising'. On October 23, he passed away at the age of 70, leaving behind a body of work that changed how brands in India speak, pause, and ultimately connect with people.
Born in 1955 into a large family in Jaipur, Piyush dabbled in cricket (winning the Ranji Trophy for Rajasthan), followed by tea tasting and other jobs before landing at Ogilvy as a trainee account executive. He gravitated quickly toward the creative side, helped by mentors like Ranjan Kapur, and by the late 1980s, he began writing campaigns that disrupted the standard English-led ad language of India. One early landmark, his work with Fevicol, turned a simple product into something that had a distinct cultural resonance. His work for Cadbury — 'Kuch Khaas Hai', and for Asian Paints — 'Har Ghar Kuch Kehta Hai', heralded a shift and helped the industry move toward truly rooted narratives.
Piyush's practice combined three constants: idiomatic language that slid easily into Indian households, visual metaphors drawn from everyday life (the tug-of-war, the festive celebration, the family conversation), and a belief that the ad stops being transient when a viewer remembers more than the product. He moved advertising out of the boardroom into the chai-tapri, with plenty of help from the red-diary-note-taking that his team used in the field.
The shift he engineered was deliberate, grounded in strategy as much as craft. Before him, many Indian ads seemed lifted wholesale from Western templates with English copy, global visual tropes, and little in the way of true localisation. But Piyush insisted on 'India speaking to India' not just through witty language but desi quintessential vocabulary and humour. His election-slogan work and public-health campaigns further showed how advertising could cross into the public sphere and shape civic imagination.
Within his lifetime he nurtured talent, anchored a creative culture at Ogilvy that dominated Indian awards tables for decades, and ensured that the brief expanded from 'make me memorable' to 'make me meaningful'. Under his leadership, the agency won Lions, LIA Legend Award (2024), internationally and locally, validating the perspective that Indian advertising could lead the global marketing industry. His legacy is visible today in every ad agency that uses a Hindi pun with confidence and in every brand that finds common Indian reference points rather than import them.
As the man who showed that the most powerful ideas can emerge from the country’s own imagination, his imprint is now woven into how India thinks, feels, and tells its stories.
