MUMBAI: The Clio Awards, an awards competition honouring excellence in advertising, design and communications, has named Piyush Pandey as the recipient of the 2012 Clio Lifetime Achievement Award.
Pandey, the executive chairman and creative director of South Asia for Ogilvy & Mather India, will be the first person from the region to receive the distinction.
With an ad career spanning three decades, Pandey is often revered to as “the godfather of Indian advertising” by peers. He will be presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 53rd annual Clio Awards ceremony, taking place on 15 May in New York.
The Clio Lifetime Achievement Award recognises the outstanding creative contributions of an individual who leads the advertising community forward.
Clio director Karl Vontz said, “Piyush truly embodies the spirit of this award. He not only possesses wonderful creative vision, but he is a great leader who motivates everyone around him with his enthusiasm and passion. We look forward to celebrating his body of work and his ongoing contributions in the field of advertising.”
Pandey, the recipient of the 2010 Advertising Agencies Association of India Lifetime Achievement Award, has won five CLIO Awards to date. Under his leadership, the Economic Times, India‘s leading business newspaper, has rated O&M the number one advertising agency in the country eight times in a row. The paper also named Pandey the most influential man in Indian advertising for eight straight years. With more than 600 international awards to its credit, O&M India is ranked among the most creative offices in the entire O&M network.
Under Pandey‘s stewardship, O&M India weathered the storm of the 2009 worldwide financial crisis and won Media Magazine‘s Office Of The Year Award. In the same year, Pandey unveiled mobile service provider Vodafone’s popular ZooZoo characters, a social phenomenon that swept India.
Clio established its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. Pandey will join the ranks of such previous honorees as director/cinematographer Tony Kaye (2001); Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO co-founder David Abbott (2002) and former Ogilvy & Mather and WPP worldwide creative director Neil French (2003).
