Ad veteran Piyush Pandey honoured posthumously with Padma Bhushan

When the Padma Awards were announced on Republic Day eve, one name stood out in a list that was from the advertising industry. Piyush Pandey, the advertising veteran who passed away in October 2025, received the Padma Bhushan posthumously, India's third-highest civilian honour.

Advertising sits between art and commerce and Pandey's work did something rare. It didn't just sell products. It created a vocabulary for how brands could talk to India without sounding like they were translating from somewhere else.

When Pandey joined Ogilvy in 1982, Indian advertising largely spoke in borrowed accents. Campaigns were polished, aspirational, and often in English, aimed at urban audience, while the rest of the country remained an afterthought.

Pandey flipped that logic. He understood that most Indians didn't live in glossy magazine spreads. They lived in neighbourhoods where humour was currency, where emotions ran close to the surface, and where a well-told story mattered more than a sleek tagline.

His path to advertising wasn't linear. Before stepping into an agency, Pandey had worked as a cricketer, a tea taster, and even on construction sites. That meandering journey gave him an instinct for how ordinary people think, talk, and feel. 

The work that followed reflected that sensibility. Fevicol's ads like ‘Fevicol Ka Mazboot Jod Hai Tootega Nahi’ became visual jokes that everyone understood, regardless of language.

Asian Paints’ ‘Har Ghar Kuch Kehta Hain’didn't just talk about colour schemes; it talked about homes and the lives lived in them.

Cadbury repositioned chocolate not as a child's treat but as a moment of joy for anyone, with a now-iconic 1993 ad showing a young girl running onto a cricket field to pick up the chocolate bar.

Lines from his campaigns were repeated in living rooms. Pandey's influence stretched beyond India. He became the first Asian to lead the jury at Cannes Lions.

But even as he earned global recognition, his creative compass remained stubbornly local. He stayed at Ogilvy for over four decades.

The Padma Bhushan doesn't erase the commercial nature of advertising. But it does something else. It acknowledges that in a country as diverse and fragmented as India, anyone who can create a shared language, even in service of selling glue or paint, has contributed something worth remembering.

Pandey listened to how India spoke, and then gave it back to itself with warmth, wit, and recognition.