Why so serious?: Narayan Devanathan pays tribute to Piyush Pandey

Narayan Devanathan, President & Chief Strategy Officer, South Asia, Dentsu, has paid tribute to Piyush Pandey, one of the most influential figures in Indian advertising. Pandey’s passing has left the industry, colleagues, friends, and admirers deeply saddened. In his tribute, Devanathan reflected on two memorable meetings with the iconic adman.

Piyush Pandey was not my mentor, nor was he my friend. I have met him on precisely two occasions in my life. In one of them, he was dismissive of me. 

So when I was asked to write something on him today, my response to the journalist was “I’m not sure if I’m qualified to write about a legend like Piyush.”

So what qualified me to end up writing this ultimately?

Piyush did.

He makes any of us in advertising in India feel like we are good enough to take on the world.

Let me talk about the first occasion on which I met Piyush. I was a callow young strategist at Ogilvy Delhi, freshly returned from spending 10 years outside India. And there was Piyush who had a finger on the pulse of everything about India.

This American QSR client of ours had been struggling with multiple months of sales decline. Piyush was called in, and he came up with an ad that involved a legendary Sri Lankan spinner licking his fingers prior to delivering a ball. That action – of licking his fingers in achingly good slow motion – then triggers a yearning for the QSR’s best-seller at the time. That was it. That was the ad. No RTBs. No belaboring any other point. A Sri Lankan cricket player as a brand ambassador to an Indian audience. And most alarmingly (or so I thought back then), no research or strategy deck to back up the idea.

The client was very cagey about it and hemmed and hawed and tried to get it junked.

I’ll never forget what Piyush told the client then.

“If this doesn’t work, I’ll stop being an adman.”

He put everything on the line. For an ad starring a Sri Lankan. To sell more of an American-branded chicken snack. In India.

Did the ad do what he promised it would? You bet it did. In spades.

The second time I met Piyush was in the context of a major annual strategy presentation to this same client. The CEO was there. So was Piyush. It was one of the best presentations in my then-young career. The CEO actually clapped at the end of it. I felt immensely happy. And then Piyush stepped in and said, “Theek hai, theek hai. Let’s go have drinks now.”

These two incidents taught me two indelible lessons: One, take your work seriously, with all the passion you can muster. Two, don’t take yourself so seriously that all you are about is your work.

It’s why Piyush is one of those rare people about whom people say good things in front of their back, not just behind their back. I mean that literally as well as metaphorically. The outpouring of the highest praise for a human we are seeing now for him after his passing is, metaphorically speaking, “behind his back.” But his work, his personality and his tangible and intangible contributions to culture and to the advertising business have drawn outpourings of the highest praise for a human throughout his working life.

How many people can you say that about, not just in the advertising business, but in any walk of life, actually?

As our industry finds itself at a daunting crossroad currently, perhaps we need to pay closer heed to those two lessons of his.

Stop being distracted by the next new-fangled thing that comes along. Stop obsessing about the wrong things. Stop being idiots with fancy titles and big words and bigger egos.

If you want to be serious about anything, then let that be the work and nothing else. And do it so inspiringly that you’ll do really well. Well enough to take all your colleagues and friends out for drinks frequently enough so that you won’t take yourself too seriously.