How Indian television's golden age fanned the genius of Piyush Pandey

Will there ever be another Piyush Pandey?

I have reported on the brand space for over 30 years, probably more than anyone else in India (before afaqs! I edited A&M magazine). Still, never could I have anticipated an outpouring of affection for an adman of the kind we saw last week.

Normally, ad folks celebrate brands. Not the other way round – and certainly not publicly by publishing large newspaper ads in his memory. But it happened.

Many things went into creating the Piyush Pandey Package: his creative brilliance, his deep insights, his ability to create stories about people in which brands were almost incidental, his delight in life, his guffaw, and his luxuriant moustache.

But it wasn't just all this. It was also the era.

After spending several years in client servicing at Ogilvy, Piyush got into the creative department only in the late 1980s. His timing was impeccable. 

Economic liberalisation came in 1991. 

India's TV revolution took off soon after. 

International names began marching into a brand-starved India. 

An outline of a new middle class began to take shape. 

India was excited about the future, and brands were a big part of the buzz. 

Had Piyush been born in 1935 instead of 1955, he would have been creating newspaper ads. And had it been 20 years later, it might have been digital content. His talent would still have stood out – but not in the way that it did. 

In an interview last year, Karan Johar predicted that Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan were the last of the superstars. Sure, there would be great actors, he added – but not superstars of the SRK kind. Currently, there was too much media noise, which prevented the creation of a superstar.

So it is with Piyush. There may be other brilliant creative minds, but will they find the broad canvas that television gave him? The ads for which he is remembered – Cadbury, Asian Paints, Luna, and Fevicol, among others – were first run on TV.

Television was not only a larger screen; at its peak it was the biggest entertainer in India. When an ad ran any evening, millions of consumers saw it at the same time – it created a common experience for all of us. 

The social impact was entirely different from getting the same number of video views, viewed privately, over weeks, as happens now.

To describe something as 'the end of an era' is such a cliche. But when Piyush went, it truly was.