Ad man Piyush Pandey to become global creative chief of Ogilvy

Advertising giant Ogilvy on Wednesday appointed Piyush Pandey as its next global chief creative officer to work in partnership with chief executive officer John Seifert and lead the company’s global creative efforts.

Pandey, 63, who has three decades of experience in advertising, will be chief creative officer, worldwide, in Ogilvy from January 1, 2019. He has been executive chairman and creative director (South Asia) in Ogilvy, owned by WPP Plc, the British advertising and marketing company. He will continue to work out of the company’s Mumbai office.

“In our business of communication, clients and customers are the most important. We have champions in every geography and I’ll work with them to try and take our flag a little higher. Both John Seifert and me have the same objectives. We will try and make the next chapter as successful and enjoyable as the last 70 years have been for Ogilvy,” Pandey said in a telephonic interview.

Seifert described Pandey as his “creative partner” in a statement released by the company.

“We could not be more thrilled that Piyush will be serving as our chief creative officer, worldwide, and my creative partner. Piyush is a true industry icon who is uniquely suited to lead our global creative efforts. Creativity has and will always be at the heart of the Ogilvy brand and culture,” he said. “Piyush is the perfect leader to shepherd that legacy as we continue to focus on making brands matter as the leading creative network in the world,” he added.

Pandey is the man behind the famous advertisement for Dairy Milk chocolate in which a girl breaks into a gleeful dance on the cricket pitch after a winning six is scored. That was in 1994. For him, it was just a nice story, but many interpreted it as an expression of freedom in those days.

Pandey’s work on brands such as Asian Paints and Fevicol cemented his place in the profession in the late 1980s and 1990s. In 1989,when Pandey moved from client servicing to creative duties at O&M India, he worked on the adhesive brand, and coined the slogan “Dam Lagake”. He produced other award-winning ads such as the one with the hen and its unbreakable egg, and the one depicting a villager who pulls fish out of a lake with a few drops of Fevikwik on a stick.

More recently, in 2014, Pandey was part of the media team that worked on the Lok Sabha election campaign of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which became the first party in 30 years to win a majority on its own in the Lower House of Parliament. He coined the slogan “Ab ki baar Modi sarkar” (this time around, a Modi government). Pandey described the 2014 Lok Sabha elections as a “golden campaign”.

wIn 2017, his team at Ogilvy also worked on the BJP’s election campaign in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand where the BJP scored big wins.

Pandey, who grew up in Jaipur, has also worked on the creative accounts of both the Indian Premier League (IPL) and Mumbai Indians, the league’s Mumbai franchise owned by tycoon Mukesh Ambani.

Cricket was a big part of Pandey’s life while growing up. His proficiency in the sport helped him get admission to Delhi University’s prestigious St Stephen’s College. Pandey says that in his early years in the profession, the advertising world of the 1970s and 1980s was not very appreciative of the consumer.

“When I joined advertising, it was stupid because it was one-sided communication. There was no consumer in the picture. It was very matter of fact, like a catalogue,” he recalls. That started to change only in the late 1980s.