AD Agencies
Amitesh Rao’s Leo India celebrates topping Warc’s creative rankings for 2025
Mumbai, 26 March — Leo India has thundered to the top of the global advertising world, clinching the No creative agency 1 spot on the Warc Effectiveness 100 rankings for 2025 with a creative arsenal that’s part marketing magic, part cultural phenomenon.
The agency’s P&G Whisper’s “The Missing Chapter”, PepsiCo Lays “Smart Farm,” Flipkart’s billion-visit masterstroke, and Mondelez Oreo’s nostalgia-fuelled “#BringBack2011” have all featured in Warc’s top 100 campaigns of the year!
CCO Publicis Groupe south Asia & chairman Leo South Asia Rajdeepak Das and CEO, Leo South Asia, Amitesh Rao shared their thoughts on this remarkable achievement.
“Being recognized as the most effective creative agency in the world is incredible because it underlines our core belief that true creative thinking is a force that can effect change for people, for the planet, and for business,” they said. “This is a testament to the culture at Leo India, the talent that calls Leo home, and our amazing clients who, together with us, continue to believe in the power of creativity to impact a billion.”
“This underlines our core belief that true creative thinking is a force that can effect change for people, for the planet, and for business,” the agency added in a Linkedin post.
AD Agencies
Fevicol releases its last ad campaign by the late Piyush Pandey
The adhesive brand’s last campaign by the late advertising legend Piyush Pandey turns an everyday Indian obsession into a quietly powerful metaphor
MUMBAI: Fevicol has never needed much of a plot. A sticky bond, a wry observation, a truth that every Indian instantly recognises — that has always been enough. “Kursi Pe Nazar,” the brand’s latest television commercial, is no different. And yet it carries a weight that no previous Fevicol film has had to bear: it is the last one its creator, the advertising legend Piyush Pandey, will ever make.
The film, released on Tuesday by Pidilite Industries, fixes its gaze on the kursi — the chair — and what it means in Indian life. Not just as a piece of furniture, but as a currency of ambition, a vessel of authority, and a source of quiet social drama that plays out in every home, office and institution across the country. Who sits in the chair, who waits for it, and who eyes it hungrily from across the room: the film transforms this sharply observed cultural truth into a narrative that is, in the best Fevicol tradition, funny, warm and instantly familiar.
The campaign was Pandey’s idea. He discussed it in detail with the team before his death, but did not live to see it shot. Prasoon Pandey, director at Corcoise Films who helmed the commercial, said the team needed five months to find its footing before they felt ready to shoot. “This was the toughest film ever for all of us,” he said. “It was Piyush’s idea, magical as always.”
The emotional weight of that responsibility was not lost on the team at Ogilvy India, which created the campaign. Kainaz Karmakar and Harshad Rajadhyaksha, group chief creative officers at Ogilvy India, described the process as “a pilgrimage of sorts, on the path that Piyush created not just for Ogilvy, but for our entire profession.”
Sudhanshu Vats, managing director of Pidilite Industries, said the film was rooted in a distinctly Indian insight. “The ‘kursi’ symbolises aspiration, transition, and ambition,” he said. “Piyush Pandey had an extraordinary ability to elevate such everyday observations into iconic storytelling for Fevicol. This film carries that legacy forward.”
That legacy is considerable. Over several decades, Pandey’s partnership with Fevicol produced some of the most beloved advertising in Indian history, building the brand into something rare: a household name that people actively enjoy watching sell to them.
“Kursi Pe Nazar” does not try to be a tribute. It simply tries to be a great Fevicol film. By most measures, it succeeds — which is, in the end, the most fitting send-off of all.
