All hell broke loose because of one flippant comment from the client team. Diwan Arun Nanda told Ruchira Raina—now executive director at advertising agency Rediffusion, and a rookie servicing hand back then in the 90s—who had accompanied him for a presentation in Kolkata, to pack up. As Raina organised the huge A2 sheets of work in her portfolio bag, Nanda told the client team, in their face, they probably didn’t know what they wanted.
“You can’t build relationships with unending dinners and lunches—that’s an unsustainable business model,” he explained some months later. “It boils down to the creative product and the expertise an ad agency brings to the table.”
A pioneer of simplicity
This precept of the client-agency relationship and his respect for the creative product were to be Nanda’s statement of purpose as an advertising professional. Nanda, co-founder of Rediffusion (1973), and among Indian advertising’s most influential figures, passed away aged 76 on Saturday.
Born in 1948, Nanda obtained his undergraduate degree from Loyola College in Chennai, and later joined IIM Ahmedabad, where he was a gold medalist as part of the very first batch of 1966. He began his career at Hindustan Lever in the late 1960s, when he joined the company’s pioneering management trainee programme. He stood out for his ability to connect consumers and brands with simple cues or elements, such as the lightning bolt for Rin detergent, which became a permanent fixture of the brand’s advertising.
Architect of India’s iconic campaigns
That principle of simplicity also became the hallmark of the agency he co-founded with Ajit Balakrishnan and Mohammed Khan. Rediffusion was a Camelot of advertising, say former colleagues, where talent was encouraged not by design, but the simple cultural ethos of giving a free hand. “When I joined a fledgling RediffPR in 1996 at a time when there were a handful of PR agencies and 360-communication was the language of agencies, Rediffusion allowed me to set up offices independent of the advertising agency,” remembers Supriyo Gupta, founder & MD, Torque Communications.
Nanda combined the flair of a creative engineer and the forensic attention-to-detail of a P&L head, running the agency that would produce some glorious advertisements such as ‘Gimme Red’ for Eveready, ‘Whenever you see colour, think of us’ for Jenson & Nicholson and the more recent ‘Isko laga dala, toh life jhingalala’ for Tata Sky.
He will be remembered, say his colleagues, for representing the best of advertising culture— urbane, sharp, entrepreneurial, creative, risk taker, and with an inherent pride in the work his agency produced.