Piyush is an idea that will live forever: Hari Krishnan

Many of us, who entered the corridors of advertising in post-Liberalisation India, were witnessing a massive shift in consumerism and pop culture in the early 1990s. Satellite television gave us a choice to opt out of a State-run TV channel that decided what we watched. We could now attain inaccessible, aspirational soft drink and fashion labels. Suddenly, ads attracted us more than movies did.  ‘Mile Sur’ was not boring, forced propaganda, but a proposition - that we wanted to hum along when it played, wearing a fresh new identity on our collective sleeve. And Piyush Pandey was at the epicentre, creating a language and  building an industry that was shedding its Anglicised past and colonial hangover. 

Piyush didn’t just create ads and brands. He ushered in a new creative culture. People who spent time at Ogilvy (then O&M, and I am fortunate to be one of them) in the early 1990s carry with them, I’m sure, an inexplicable creative energy, having been infected by Piyush’s leadership and vision not just for the agency, but for the entire industry. Whether they chose to practice them or not, is a different story altogether. He democratised creativity. He took creativity out of a ‘department’ and handed it over to everyone to play with. I still recall the contest he floated during the Golden Jubilee of India’s freedom (1997), asking every agency member, across departments, to create special commemorative ads for all our brands. Our efforts were rewarded with exclusive Titan watches and personal notes from the man himself. 

Piyush Pandey’s departure coincides with a time when advertising is passing through a significant inflection point. 

The discussions and debates about how the “funnel as we know it, is dead” and the rapid ‘content to commerce’ journey of digitally native consumers - seem to suggest that an era and its principles of brand ideas and stories have lost their relevance, and therefore left the building with him. Today’s performance marketing Gurus treat the ‘top funnel’ and ‘brand storytelling’ as indulgent, nice-to-have line items on the spreadsheet, if budgets permit. But no one has the answer of how to scale promising ideas - how to not just proliferate metrics, but seed ideas into everyday parlance and culture that people express themselves with. My regular interaction with Gen-Z students of marketing  strengthens my belief - in every case study session there are examples from every brand Piyush sculpted as iconic, inspirational and relevant examples of what brands should be all about. From one generation to next, his legacy will be passed on, Piyush is an idea that will live forever.