Ziel Network’s new CSO Ravpreet Ganesh has spent a career asking the uncomfortable question

MUMBAI: Some careers are built by changing jobs.

Ravpreet Ganesh’s has been built by changing the question.

What makes a brand matter?

What makes a team work?

Why do some ideas travel while others die in the room?

And, perhaps most importantly, what does the person sitting across the table see that you don’t?

It is a useful way to spend nearly three decades in advertising and marketing.

Ganesh  joined Ziel Network as group chief strategy officer earlier this month. That is the news.

But it is hardly the whole story.

The more interesting story is the woman who has arrived at Ziel.

She has spent her career on both sides of the table, in large agencies and entrepreneurial businesses, working on brands ranging from Airtel and Google to Apple, Samsung, Nestlé, Bacardi and Marlboro.

She has been a strategist, business leader, agency builder, marketer and, increasingly, a teacher.

And somewhere along the way she seems to have discovered that the job is not really about having the answer.

It is about asking the better question.

The Airtel years

Ganesh started her advertising career at Rediffusion DY&R in 1995.

Her first account was Airtel.

There was a small catch.

Airtel was then a single-city operation.

Over the next eight years she was involved in its new initiatives and product launches. By the time she left Rediffusion, she was looking after the brand nationally.

In 2000, when Airtel was being launched nationally, Ganesh was the only woman in the room.

That is worth pausing over.

This was not today’s advertising industry, with its vocabulary of inclusion, diversity and representation. It was a business where the room often looked remarkably similar from one meeting to the next.

Ganesh had to make her voice count.

And she did.

Airtel would become one of India’s defining consumer brands. Ganesh had been there when the brand was still figuring out what it wanted to become.

That experience probably explains something about her.

She has never been particularly interested in brands as advertising exercises.

She is interested in what they do to people.

Then came the tour of advertising

After Rediffusion came Lowe, where she headed the Polo account and Lifestyle, the fashion and home retail chain owned by Landmark Group. Then Dentsu, followed by Leo Burnett and Publicis.

At Publicis, the job kept changing.

She joined as a business lead at Leo Burnett, moved to lead an agency, took a central Groupe role and eventually led Publicis Content. Along the way she helped create teams and capabilities in digital, content, brand ambassador programmes and experiential marketing.

In her own account of those 15 years, she talks about evolving from an advertising lead into a “communication and solutions professional”. What she carried forward, she said, was a love of work that changes consumer behaviour, curiosity about what is new and a particular fascination with technology.

That word, curiosity, crops up often around Ganesh.

It is not the curiosity of someone looking for the next shiny object.

It is the curiosity of someone who suspects that the obvious answer is probably not the best one.

Shipra Nangia, who reported to her at Publicis Content, remembers Ganesh pushing her to look beyond platforms and formats and understand how brands connect with culture.

Gursimran, now head of strategy at PHD Singapore and formerly of JioSaavn, Publicis, Marico and MullenLowe Lintas, remembers someone prepared to back bold ideas, challenge conventional thinking and then get deep into the work.

That combination matters.

Anyone can challenge.

Anyone can execute.

Doing both is rather harder.

The boss people remember

Look at the recommendations from people who have worked with Ganesh and another pattern emerges.

They talk about her.

But they talk almost as much about themselves after working with her.

That is usually a good sign.

Shreya Krishnatray, who started her career under Ganesh, says Ganesh became her benchmark for a leader, manager and mentor.

She remembers someone who could spot a person’s potential before the person could see it themselves.

Someone shy about presenting?

Ganesh noticed.

Someone unable to say no?

She noticed that too.

Someone ready for more responsibility?

She would give it to them.

That is not management by spreadsheet.

It is management by observation.

Jasmine Sachdeva, managing partner at Wavemaker India, describes a leader who could offer a fresh perspective on innovation, ideas and client management, but was also someone people approached simply to clear their heads.

Amitabh Sreedharan, EVP at INNOCEAN India, talks about her ability to bring structure to ambiguity and combine business thinking with execution.

And Gursimran points to another quality: the ability to stay completely inside a conversation while simultaneously stepping outside it and seeing what the situation actually requires.

That is a rather good definition of a strategist.

Be in the room.

Don’t get trapped by the room.

The teacher

Perhaps the most revealing thing about Ganesh now has little to do with advertising.

She mentors teenagers.

Since January 2023, she has volunteered with Claylab Education Foundation, mentoring students in classes 10–12 from less privileged backgrounds.

One of the people who worked with her at Claylab described her as one of its strongest mentors and pointed to the relationship she built with her mentee, Anuj.

There is something fitting about that.

For someone who has spent decades developing brands and teams, teaching becomes another form of strategy.

You are not handing someone the answer.

You are helping them discover that they can find it.

And perhaps that explains why Ganesh seems to place such importance on mentoring inside the workplace too.

She has written about winning teams and asked what actually makes them succeed: vision, diversity, complementary skills or a shared goal. Her own thinking points repeatedly towards trust, empathy, openness and mentoring.

She also writes about learning from other people.

After completing an intensive professional programme, she described it as part of an ongoing “upskilling journey” one step at a time.

Nearly 30 years into a career, she still talks like someone who has something left to learn.

That may be one of her more important characteristics.

What she seems to believe

Read enough of what people who have worked with Ganesh say about her, and a philosophy emerges.

Question things.

Stay curious.

Listen.

Give people room.

Don’t confuse seniority with wisdom.

Don’t confuse strategy with slides.

And don’t confuse being in charge with having to be the smartest person in the room.

She has spoken about listening to teams and being open to learning and changing.

That last bit is important.

The advertising business is full of people who became successful because they were right.

The better leaders are usually the ones who remain willing to discover that they were wrong.

Ganesh appears to belong to the latter tribe.

The next room

So now comes Ziel.

The network has built itself around specialist boutiques, small, senior teams with ownership and accountability, while trying to retain the reach of a larger network. It has more than 200 people, over 60 clients and a presence across India and international markets.

Ganesh’s brief is to help connect the pieces, sharpen the strategic direction, develop new capabilities and take the network into its next phase.

It is a sensible match.

Ziel wants scale without losing agility.

Ganesh has spent much of her career trying to find precisely that balance.

But the appointment itself is almost incidental.

Because the real story of Ravpreet Ganesh is not that she has moved to another agency.

It is that after nearly three decades, she still seems to be doing the same thing she did when she walked into that Airtel room in 2000.

Looking around.

Listening carefully.

Asking the question nobody else is asking.

And then getting on with the work.

That is a career.

And, more importantly, that is a way of working.