Why Prasoon Joshi believes vulnerability is advertising’s edge

When Prasoon Joshi stepped on stage to accept his Hall of Fame honour from the Advertising Agencies Association of India, he did not begin with awards, agencies or campaigns. He began with a river.

“When you go near a stream, you will find stones lying nearby,” he said. “Pick them up and you will find them chiselled once you touch them. Who chiselled them? They’ve been chiselled by collisions during their journey.”

Joshi placed himself among those stones. A boy from Uttarakhand who rolled downstream, shaped not by polish but by friction, pressure and experience. It is an image that quietly captures both his life and his creative philosophy.

Where order met effervescence

Joshi’s childhood was shaped by two distinct creative forces. His father, an education officer and civil servant, represented discipline and structure. His mother, a trained musician, embodied instinct and art. In such a household, rebellion was not an option. Only balance.

“My father wanted order from me. My mother wanted effervescence,” he recalled. “And I found advertising.”

The discovery came during his MBA, through a chapter on advertising in Philip Kotler’s textbook. It revealed a rare possibility. A profession where logic and imagination could coexist without apology. Advertising, for Joshi, was not a compromise. It was alignment.

When he joined Trikaya Grey, he was already a published poet. Sandeep Goyal was his manager, and he trained under Freddy Birdy and Naved Akhtar, learning the fundamentals of copywriting. Yet uncertainty lingered.

“There is potential in the seed, but it cannot become a tree without sunlight, wind, water and manure. At Ogilvy, my potential was unlocked.”

“I had a book of poems but at that time I thought only friends and relatives read poetry and people don’t buy poetry books,” he said. That uncertainty, he believes, sits at the heart of creativity itself. Creative people, Joshi suggested, are inherently vulnerable.

“When a creative person tells you a story, be patient, be kind,” he said. “That person is exposing something very personal to you. That person has taken something from their own life and built the courage to bring it to you.”

Vulnerability, for Joshi, is not something to be managed or masked. It is the profession’s quiet power. “That vulnerability is the strength of our profession,” he said. “If we become too well rounded, clients will stop coming to us. They are well rounded. We are vulnerable. That is how it works.”

Lose that vulnerability, he warned, and advertising loses its soul.

Finding a home for instinct

After Grey, Joshi moved to Ogilvy. As a bilingual writer fluent in Hindi and English, he was wary of being confined by stereotype. Hindi writers, he noted, were often pushed into narrow creative lanes working for "Hindi brands."

His curiosity, however, extended far beyond language. That curiosity found its fullest expression at Ogilvy, where he worked closely with Suresh Mullick and Piyush Pandey.

“I owe a lot to Suresh because he taught me that the things I hum and sing are your strength,” Joshi said. Mullick encouraged him to trust his musical instincts, to brief composers with confidence, and to see intuition as craft rather than indulgence. “He taught me like a son.”

From Piyush Pandey came another lesson. Restraint.

“He would tell me I write well but I write a lot. Write less,” Joshi said. It was a lesson in economy. Brevity, he learned, is not reduction but precision. “People don’t have time. You have to make it concise.” Not everyone agreed. Legacy adman Neil French, Joshi recalled, held the opposing view that long copy was far from dead. 

It was also at Ogilvy that Joshi met Aparna, his life partner, a detail he mentioned simply, as part of the same ecosystem that shaped both his work and his life.

“A seed is programmed,” Joshi said. “There is potential in the seed, but it cannot become a tree without sunlight, wind, water and manure. At Ogilvy, my potential was unlocked.”

One instinct, many expressions

That freedom allowed Joshi to experiment beyond advertising, particularly with songwriting. As his visibility grew, questions followed. Was he spreading himself too thin by pursuing parallel creative paths?

“I told them I don’t want to be a frustrated creative person,” he said. “I want to express myself in whichever way I am.” To him, writing the Silk Route album or Ab Ke Saawan was no different from crafting Coca Cola’s “Umeedo wali dhoop, sunshine wali aasha,” or writing lyrics such as “dhoop hai, cham se nikal” for Taare Zameen Par.

“For me, there is no difference,” he said. “It is pure exploration. My interests enrich me and hum with life.” What does differ, he explained, is certainty. “In advertising, I know my destination. In poetry, the destination is explored.”

That philosophy followed him into leadership. When he moved from heading creative at Ogilvy Mumbai to taking on the challenge of reshaping McCann, he found himself thinking about balance once again.

“What has been expressed is data. What has not been expressed is human.”

“Even a sitar’s string has to be pulled tight,” he said. “Too much tension will break it. Too little will make it limp. The right amount creates music.” At McCann, he tried to find that pitch. His sensitivity extended to brands as well. Joshi spoke fondly of what he called murmur brands. Brands without volume or dominance.

“You cannot hear a flute amidst the roar of a dhol,” he said. “You have to create an atmosphere to hear the flute.” Helping such brands find clarity amid noise remains one of his quiet motivations. Perfetti Van Melle, he noted, was one such example.

Staying with confusion

As the speech moved towards its conclusion, Joshi turned inward, to first principles. “I believe confusion is very good,” he said. “It is the liminal space where ideas reside. Finality kills creativity.” That belief has shaped how he navigates moments of crisis, which he sees not as reputational tests but ethical ones.

“A real test of an agency is during a crisis,” he said, recalling moments such as the Coca Cola pesticide controversy and the Maggi noodles recall. “With Maggi, my simple advice was communicate,” he said. “Talk to the mothers who feel cheated, as if they have fed something wrong to their children.”

His view of culture is similarly rooted in respect rather than instruction. India, he reminded the audience, is not a blank slate.

“It is one thing to ride culture and another to create culture,” he said. “India is a continuous civilisation.”

Rather than announcing something new, brands must search if it already exists but has been forgotten. “There is a difference between saying you do not know and saying you know but you have forgotten,” he said.

The future and the unexpressed

Joshi’s discomfort with distance extends even to authorship itself. “I would like to be born not as a creator but as a creation,” he said. “I want to become my song on people’s lips.”

That concern reappeared as he spoke about artificial intelligence. He described the future as one of collaboration between humans and human centric technology.

“AI is an ally,” he said. “An extension, not an expression.” Used well, AI can prevent ideas from dying simply because they were poorly presented. But it cannot generate true originality.

“If you want AI to give you something unconventional, it will only take you to what is already accepted as unconventional,” he warned. 

His deeper unease lay with data and hyper personalisation. Knowing everything, he argued, is not wisdom. Knowing the right thing is. “Where do we draw the line?” he asked. “Where are we anchoring AI?”

That question, he suggested, can only be answered through values, education and ethics.

To close, Joshi turned to Anton Chekhov’s Misfortune, a story in which a woman chooses her husband's innocence and love over his friend's manipulation to win her. It is not desire that guides her decision, but values.

“Yes, AI is great,” Joshi said. “But it depends on what has been said.” 

“What has been expressed is data. What has not been expressed is human.”

He ended on a note that felt deliberately unresolved. “The most beautiful song has not been composed. The most beautiful idea has not been thought.”