How different have the last four months been since you have moved into an advisory role with Ogilvy?

Not different. In the sense that, the people who have taken over – Hephzibah (Pathak, chairperson, Ogilvy India) and VR (Rajesh, CEO, Ogilvy India) were already doing a lot of work. They’re just doing it officially. They were always champions and continue to be so. Are they doing anything new? You’ll need to ask them. I’ve always thought they were doing what they could do.

For me personally, I know only one thing and that’s what I continue doing with clients that I was working on. I’m getting people to work with those clients, the likes of Pidilite so that they settle down with them. That’s the only difference.

How have clients responded to that?

They were worried in the beginning. But they know that and Devika (Bulchandani, global chief executive officer, Ogilvy) made it very clear that I’m not going anywhere. It’s about now bringing more people from the team and making them settle down while you’re helping them.

The more people you’re referring to? Would that be the current team or is the agency looking to hire?

It’s the current team. In case we need to hire, we will, but at this moment we don’t need to.

You just bagged the Lotus Legend. You’ve also won the Lion of St. Mark at Cannes in 2018 and the Clio Lifetime Achievement Award. How big of a role have awards played in your career?

There are more to come too, but I can’t talk about them right now. These are your lifetime’s work, which is collectively being recognised. They come when they have to come. If they don’t come, it doesn’t matter. But when they do come, you feel good and thank those who have recognised you and made you reach somewhere. That’s where Sukesh (Nayak, CCO, Ogilvy India), Harshad (Rajadhyaksha, CCO, Ogilvy India), Kainaz (Karmakar, CCO, Ogilvy India), Hephzibah, and those from the past like Rajiv Rao and Abhijit Avasthi, and many more come into play. It’s the team that plays. It’s for all the runs I scored earlier, I’m collecting the trophies now.

So the advice for the younger crop at Ogilvy would be keep scoring and the trophies will come?

I’ve always said that you don’t need to look at the scoreboard. Just keep batting. You play for the team to win a match. When you win a match, chances are that one of you will win the man of the match, your team will win the tournament, you will win the world, and chances are that you’ll be a legend.

When you write a story, take for instance the Mahabharata and Ramayana, they were writing legends. But they didn’t know that. There’s so much to learn from history – don’t think you’re God’s gift to mankind and just write the next story. Whether it’s great or not is decided by people and not you.

Your cricket analogy leads me to my next question. What do you think of the advertising around the IPL? In earlier conversations you’ve had with me while I was with Campaign India, you mentioned that brands are mindlessly using celebs. Is that something you’re continuing to see?

Yes, we continue seeing that. The idea needs to be the celebrity. If your idea is the celebrity, then if you need someone as a celebrity, bring one in. For 40 years I worked on Pidilite, from Fevicol to Fevikwik to M-Seal. All those ideas are bigger celebrities than ideas made with celebrities.

There’s a beautiful example to substantiate this. When the Hutch pug and the boy campaign was released, there was a magazine that did a ranking on celebrities. There were big names on that list. The pug topped the list, while the Khans followed.
Then in 2008, when the Zoozoos came, The Economic Times used them in every column. This was a reaction to what things would cost. The entire newspaper was with Zoozoos and we didn’t pay a penny.

There’s a lovely quote I saw the other day in a movie – ‘nothing can make a bad idea, good’. That’s what it is. You get the biggest star for a bad story and they can’t help you.

Among these campaigns, a few stand out though. The Dream11 campaign has sort of caught the eye…\

They have always been good. In the first two commercials I saw this year I didn’t see the spark. The third one actually made me sit up and admire the ad like none other in this IPL. It had a deeper idea than the others, had fantastic performances and was completely lovable. I think Rohit Sharma is soon going to give the Bollywood actors a run for their money. I’ve seen him earlier and always thought he’s a good actor and my conviction in him as an actor grew further more. And Suneil Shetty as usual is in his beautifully underplayed humorous self.

It’s a long season and I look forward to seeing more good ads from Dream11.

What about other brands that have returned to the IPL this season with similar ideas from the years gone by?

One shouldn’t get so attached to something that one shuts their eyes. When Harshad, Kainaz, and the team wanted to use Shimona in the role-reversal campaign for Cadbury, they came to me. I could have told them that it’s my Kohinoor and I’ll keep it in my vault or say that it’s such a fantastic idea, that I can bring it out of it and shine it in one more place. That’s what they did.
Sometimes you should be possessive. Sometimes you bring it out for one more shine. The only contribution I made was I told them to not touch the music.

Last week there was an update that McCann bagged the BJP account. Was that something Ogilvy was pitching for too? Having worked on the account in 2019 and 2014, will this be something the agency misses this year?

I have no idea whether we’ll be handling them too. McCann could well be the lead agency for this year’s elections. You can’t take political campaigns as your own forever. In 2014, there were many agencies and McCann did some work too, but we were the lead. In 2019 it was the same thing. For 2024, they’ve not informed me officially, but it could well be anyone.
We never budget for political campaigns. If they happen, it’s good for you.

Recently at Spikes Asia, Ogilvy was the most-awarded Indian agency. Going by that parameter, if Ogilvy is the most creative agency in the country today, who do you see as your closest competitor? Would it be the newbies like Talented and Moonshot – the founder of the latter has been labelled the next Piyush Pandey by a publication too, or do you still think it’s the likes of McCann and Lowe?

Not today, for a long time, we have been the most creative agency in the country. We’ve never looked at it in that way when it comes to competition. When the results come in, we’ve seen lots of changes.

We don’t start the year by saying we’ll be the number one by winning awards. We want to be the number one in the hearts of the people. Winning awards is a good thing and makes you feel good, but if you’re not mentioned by people on the street, then you’re not good at all.

PG Aditiya and Tanmay Bhat will do good work. It’ll depend on the consistency though. They’re good people with a good record. (About the headline and Tanmay Bhat), he has come up with a few different campaigns and this will put pressure on him. He’ll have to do a lot more work. Headlines can appear in different ways.

I’ve faced this before. The journalist told me that we need them to stand out. But you can’t have the wrong headlines. He had asked me a question about if two senior creative leaders were to come back to Ogilvy, would there be a place for them? My response was that if I was to leave Ogilvy for two years, there wouldn’t be a place for me too, because someone would have filled it. The headline he put up was that Piyush Pandey said that there’s no place for the both of them.

What do you think is the biggest challenge for the advertising industry right now?

Ideas. These stretch across creative content, use of media, and bringing in other ways of new media. It’s always about the idea. AI (artificial intelligence) will remain artificial. The day it gets real intelligence, we’ll speak about it. I’ve called AI a chaprasi (peon). And then I apologised – because I thought the peon was far more intelligent.

I’ve got a theory on big data too. If you look at the computer, you’ll see data. If you look outside of it you’ll see the duniya (the real world).

This feature first appeared in the April edition of Manifest.

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Brave clients are crucial in helping agencies bag glory: Ogilvy India's CCOs