Piyush Pandey’s death feels like the closing of a chapter not only in advertising but in Indian business itself. What leaves with him is a way of thinking about brands as living, breathing presences in people’s lives—not engineered constructs optimised for performance. He represented an instinctive understanding that commerce and culture were never separate, that selling could be an act of participation in the national conversation.
In the years when India was learning the language of markets, Pandey gave those markets a vocabulary rooted in emotion, idiom, and mischief. He made brands stand not for propositions, but for felt human ideas. Fevicol became a metaphor for endurance, Cadbury for celebration, Asian Paints for belonging. These were not coincidences of creative luck; they were acts of cultural translation. Pandey recognised that in a country as layered as India, persuasion works only when it sounds familiar. A good line was one that felt overheard.
That sensibility came from a temperament rare in business—one that trusted feeling as a form of intelligence. Pandey was not allergic to data or discipline, but he placed intuition first. He saw the consumer not as a data point to be decoded but as someone to be felt, to be empathised with.
Ogilvy under him became less a hierarchy than a habitat. Energy mattered more than expertise, curiosity more than credentials. The place produced great work not because it enforced process but because it cultivated permission—to argue, to joke, to be irreverent, to care. His own presence, with its mix of playfulness and authority, gave others the courage to bring their lives into their work. He never lectured about authenticity; he made it safe. He backed his team to the hilt, encouraging them, guiding them, inspiring them, without ever making them feel smaller.
The India that fed this way of thinking no longer exists. The one-channel nation has fragmented into algorithmic silos. Observation has been replaced by measurement. Communication has become a form of data exhaust. Creativity, once a social act, is now a technical function. Pandey’s world thrived on shared laughter; today’s thrives on personalised feeds.
This shift has made advertising efficient but airless. Campaigns chase awards and engagement metrics, yet few enter public memory. The busload of Fevicol passengers that refused to come apart carried not just glue but metaphor — it spoke about resilience, community, humour. That kind of idea emerged from watching how India behaves, not from watching how it clicks. The decline of such observation has impoverished both communication and commerce. Brands still spend, still grow, but rarely inhabit the cultural imagination.
For business leaders, this loss matters. The market may reward short-term visibility, but long-term value is built on meaning. Emotional equity compounds in ways that performance metrics cannot capture. Piyush’s generation built monopolies of affection — brands that owned feelings rather than features. That remains the surest route to profitability in a distracted world. To own a piece of emotion is to buy endurance.
There is also a lesson in how he led. Piyush’s authority did not come from systems; it came from belief. He made creativity feel legitimate in boardrooms that once regarded it as indulgence. He could translate a joke into a business argument without killing its spirit. When he entered a room, the conversation changed register—from what a brand should say to what it should mean. That shift, subtle as it was, created billions in enterprise value.
And he infused his work with his personality. Every assignment, no matter how small, received his full attention as well as emotional investment. Every client he worked with, no matter how small, knew that their work mattered to him, that he felt for them both as people and as shepherds of their businesses.
His creative fluency meant that he was never short of ideas. Unlike many other creative people who took pleasure in being difficult, Piyush was someone who could overwhelm clients with the sheer profusion of ideas.
His passing exposes the vacuum left when belief departs from leadership. Many organisations today are fluent in efficiency but mute in conviction. They can measure almost everything except what they stand for. Piyush’s legacy reminds us that meaning is not an accessory to commerce; it is its organising principle.
The temptation now will be to memorialise him as a legend of a vanishing craft. That would be too easy. The deeper tribute would be to recover what his work quietly insisted on—that creativity and empathy are not opposites, that language is a form of strategy, that to move people is to move markets. Every founder and manager chasing purpose-driven growth would do well to look there, not in manifestos but in moments of genuine connection.
The industry will continue, more automated, more polished, less porous. It will celebrate itself noisily, and life will go on. Yet somewhere beneath the hum of content, a silence will remain—the absence of that particular warmth with which advertising once spoke to the country. Piyush Pandey carried that warmth effortlessly. He made the business of persuasion feel human. And perhaps that is the simplest way to describe what we have lost: Not just a creative man, but the conviction that a brand could have a soul. And a heart.
(Santosh Desai is CEO of Futurebrands India, an author, and a leading advertising thinker)
First Published: Oct 25, 2025, 12:34
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