Sumanto Chattopadhyay retires: a look back at his creative journey

He’s best known for his love for the English language and his flowing locks of hair. After spending three decades in the world of advertising, Chattopadhyay is finally hanging up his boots - it's his last day at 82.5 Communications, Ogilvy and WPP today. Earlier this month, he announced his retirement and Anuraag Khandelwal and Mayur Varma will take on the creative leadership role as joint Chief Creative Officers, 82.5 Communications India.

Throughout his creative career, he has dabbled in different art forms, including acting, modelling. He also has an alter-ego that he’s well known as on social media - The English Nut.

The English Nut creates a range of educational content relating to the English language - including decoding idioms, the meanings of interesting words, the origins of phrases etc. The content is in the form of short videos scripted, produced and acted in by Chattopadhyay himself.

The English Nut may have started out as a side project for him, but his intellectual property will be developed into something more soon - a full fledged book.

“I have been writing a book based on the English Nut. It was commissioned by a publisher and I’m behind schedule on that. The book is based on a lot of topics that I cover in The English Nut. It’s basically the story is behind words and phrases. This is what I cover with content on the English Nut too and a publisher had noticed this a while back and said, it could become a really nice book and I agreed,” he tells us.

Both with the book and with creating content for The English Nut, Chattopadhyay reveals that there’s a great deal of research and thought that goes into creating it.

“Some of my followers think that I just happen to know all these things at the back of my hand, but that's not true - it’s all based on research, which takes time. Earlier I was applying my crafting skills in advertising, now I have to apply them while writing this book,” he says.

Before he embarked on the journey to join the world of advertising, he got a MBA degree from McGill University in Montreal, Canada and realised he didn’t just want to be one of the guys in suits. He recalls how when he initially applied for a job in Ram Ray’s agency Response - he was offered a position on the client servicing team.

He calls working in Ogilvy an educational experience and that he learnt a lot from observing and working with bigwigs like Piyush Pandey and others. He credits The English Nut with teaching the nuances of social media. He adds that it has helped him improve the quality of work since all the brands that Ogilvy handles are on social media and an innate understanding of it is helpful.

“If I'm running the English Nut on social media, it gives me some intuitive understanding about how social media works and what works on social media. It gave me a lot of confidence with this new age of medium,” he says.

He mentions that one of his favourite parts of doing creative work is being on set while shooting. He talks with passion about how creative directors work long hours to bring an idea to life and how challenging it can be.

In 2017 - Chattopadhyay was asked to take over the reins of WPP’s agency Soho Square as chairman and chief creative officer. In 2019, Soho Square was rebranded to 82.5 Communications - an agency meant to specifically cater to Indian companies and entrepreneurs. 82.5 is the point which happens to be in the middle of Eastern and Western longitudinal extremities in the country.

Chattopadhyay admits that his stint at 82.5 Communications was outside his comfort zone - unlike the work that he had done at Ogilvy in the past few decades on brands like Dove, Airtel, etc. 82.5 Communications has also done region-specific campaigns for brands such as Himalaya and Bisleri.

Every job has good and bad days though. When asked about a particularly frustrating experience he’s had on the job - he recalls a shoot that was planned for a cement brand a few years back.

“We had planned an outdoor shoot with a celebrity and out of nowhere, there was a pre-monsoon shower that ruined the set. Since we couldn’t get the celebrity on different dates, we decided to shift the shoot to an indoors studio and work with a green screen. This was when the use of green screen had recently been introduced and it wasn’t done with a sense of finesse. We were horrified with the results, but we had to keep going back to the drawing board until we could find a usable idea,” he says.

If he hadn’t gotten into advertising - Chattopadhyay muses that he probably would have become an actor. He has starred in a role in Bollywood movie Piku and modelled for fashion photographer Rafique Sayed.