Farewell, Partner: How Piyush Pandey bridged the great divide between Creativity and Media

Kodak had just selected O&M as their global advertising agency; and in India the famous KB10 campaign was launched, with the core proposition, that it is so easy to use, anybody can use a camera. Those were the days, when phones are meant to be at home and mobile phones meant, it should have buttons. It was around this time, I was transferred to Ogilvy Mumbai from its Chennai office as a Media Planner in the then fully integrated 360 degree advertising agency. 1995.

Media planning used to be the last two slides of an otherwise long elaborate agency presentation and creatives used to hog their limelight all through these meetings. I hated it. People who know me, know this very well. Although I enjoyed the creative process, I just felt that, media planning was not getting its due importance. It was with this baggage, I entered Ogilvy, And met Piyush Pandey. I thought, it was a lost cause to champion media planning, but somewhere, somehow, Piyush must have got the sense of what I was thinking.

Piyush encouraged media planners to “hang around with the creatives” and I thoroughly enjoyed this phase. What followed later was some of the best innovations in media at that time. Kodak Moment was one of the best innovations we would have ever delivered. The idea was to freeze the live telecast for a few seconds to frame it as the Kodak Moment. This was creative and media working together at its best. Piyush never bothered about the ROI. The ideas were so deeply entrenched in the popular culture, that it just simply worked our brilliantly. Some of the innovations we went on to deliver between 1995 and 2000 for Kissan Annapurna, Dove, Lakme, Asian Paints, Sunlight, to name a few, were simply outstanding.

Piyush hated media agencies becoming independent. Really hated it. Creative agencies and media agencies had to make special and extra effort to work together. And he was the magnet that attracted the split media agencies to flock to the creatives to find that glue. Most of us missed his presence, for his anecdotal, but very sharp, ground level consumer insights, that just served as a fantastic top up to an otherwise bland demographic or psychographic definition of a consumer.

The world knows Piyush Pandey as a creative genius. Little known fact is how Piyush played a key role in connecting media with the creative; always driven by a sharp consumer insight, far better than anybody else. Even as the media agencies drifted away from the creative agencies, for good long 25 years, the moment Piyush gets involved, it is always magic.

In the data driven, and now AI driven communications business, we will all miss the original genius in Piyush. His ideas won’t fit into any large language model for popular culture lies in the heart and not in the computers. And that is were Piyush will remain for most of us. In our heart. Farewell, Partner!

Gowthaman Ragothaman is a media, advertising and marketing veteran and founder of Saptharushi.