I wish I had made these

The Cadbury Dairy Milk- kuch khaas hai zindagi mein ad is one of my most favourite ads. That jingle is like poetry. It is an extremely spontaneous ad and it does something to you beyond explanation. Moreover, it did something to a place like O&M as it made us believe that we could do great work. I believe that people buy philosophies and not brands. This is the kind of ad which does much more than just sell the brand, it sells a philosophy. Another favourite is Tata Safari-Reclaim your life ad for the same reason.

I also love the Fevicol ?bus? ad. It shows the simplicity of product demonstration. It is a simple idea and execution just takes it to another level. I like ads which are not limited by language and this ad is one of them.

Thank god, it isn?t me

Any ad that makes me feel like puking and wastes my 30 seconds is a bad ad according to me. One would be the JK Cement ad with a bikini clad woman and another would be the MDH ad with the old man.

My first ad

There were a few ads which we worked on almost at the same time. Pushpi (Pushpinder Singh) was my partner at that time. These campaigns were Amaron Batteries- claymation, Close Up-kya aap Close Up karte hai and Tata Sumo-kuch log Sumo chalate hai. We came into our own after these ads. Amaron was a path-breaking product and we worked on it from the scratch.

Close Up campaign was about new execution of the old boy-girl story. The clients took a chance with this campaign. We had recorded the jingle first and then shot the ad. It was a joint effort from me, Pushpi and Chetan Shashital who sang the jingle in a nasal voice like yesteryear?s singer Sahgal and Prasoon Pandey shot the commercial.

Tata Sumo is the best example of a truly Indian ad. The interesting thing is that it was not talking to the potential buyers but to the existing customers.

Sagar Mahabaleshwarkar, who was a sportsman at the state level in Baroda, took up commercial arts to finish his graduation. He then started his career with Designcore, a small design shop in Bangalore. After that, he joined Ogilvy & Mather (O&M) Bangalore in 1993 as visualiser. After about four years, he took a transfer to O&M Mumbai where he worked with Sonal Dabral, Piyush Pandey, Pushpinder Singh and Bobby Pawar .

He spent about 15 years in Ogilvy before joining Rediffusion Y&R as its chief creative officer where he partnered Ramanuj Shastry. Here, he worked on brands such as Airtel, Tata Nano, Colgate, LG India, Kingfisher, Sleepwell, Taj and SugarFree. In 2010, he decided to partner with ex-colleague Sonal Dabral and joined Bates 141 as its national creative director. He says, ?Bates is O&M?s sister agency, so the culture is quite same. I was excited to team up with Sonal and Pat (Sandeep Pathak). Bates has build brands like Fiat and Virgin Mobile and that also attracted me to it.?

A lesser known fact about Mahabaleshwarkar is his acting stints. He has acted in a Hallmark commercial directed by Abhinay Deo where he played the role of a 25-year-old confused about his love. He has also acted in the Tata Sumo commercial ?Reclaim your life?.

(As told to Payal Khandelwal)