Devika Seth Bulchandani, Global CEO of Ogilvy, wanted India to be her first market visit after her appointment to her current post last month.
Piyush Pandey, the Chief Creative Officer Worldwide and Executive Chairman India of Ogilvy, introduced her saying, “The new leader of the company is here with us. Ogilvy is delighted to have Devika worldwide but India is little more delighted to have a person who’s been born and studied in India for a long time.”
Bulchandani addressed the media stating, “What an honour it is to sit next to Piyush as I call him the ‘Godfather of the agency’. Ogilvy India is the crown jewel of our network and Piyush is the soul of this brand.”
The ‘Fearless Girl’
Speaking about her life’s journey, she said, “I was always stopped and told that I couldn’t do a few things because ‘girls don’t do that’, coming from a conservative Punjabi family in Amritsar. I just could not understand the difference why we were not allowed to do certain things. When I was 13, I told my mother I will leave and go to the US. I just wanted my independence, have my self-worth defined by what I do.”
With that kind of upbringing and with that attitude, Bulchandani is the girl behind the ‘Fearless girl’ campaign, remarked Pandey.
When the current global CEO moved to Ogilvy, Forbes.com ran this headline: ‘Ogilvy Poaches A Fearless Girl: The Pluses And Minuses Of Hiring External Leaders.’
She added, “I found advertising by mistake but it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. The ability we have as an industry to use the power of human imagination, we understand human beings and create new realities. Today we are also creating solutions for humanity, society, and small business as we are doing with Mondelez, changing the course of girls as we do with Dove – what an incredible movement.”
“If you choose a healthy dose of delusional optimism, chase greatness and do it with goodness, I promise you whatever you are going to do, will be spectacular,” she underlined.
Breaking barriers
On breaking gender barriers and becoming the first Indian-origin female global CEO of Ogilvy, she observed, “A barrier is an opportunity to break through, and the most important thing for women to do is not give up. Barrier should be an invitation to do what you want to do; that takes fearlessness because we have to shed a lot of things. Women especially come with so much baggage that we have to shed it and that is the conscious choice we have to make. It takes fearlessness and strength to do it.”
Speaking on the positive approach, she remarked, “Delusional optimism is actually a prerequisite of what we do. We are constantly imagining new things that have never been done before that is the mandate of our industry today. Use technology, data, in new ways; how do you do that if you don’t have delusional optimism? I don’t know how to do that without the sense of ‘it is possible, it can be done.”
Future plans
The future plan for Ogilvy India is to continue on the journey that they are on in terms of creativity excellence and to continuously expand the way creativity shows up but ‘never to lose the soul’, noted the global CEO.
“They are doing the best work in the network. From a scale and size perspective, they dominate; they run a business like no other in our network. They have a plan for 2023 expanding into new territories,” she explained.
Last month Ogilvy had announced the appointment of Bulchandani as the Global Chief Executive Officer. In her new role she is responsible for all aspects of the creative network’s business across 131 offices in 93 countries spanning its advertising, public relations experience, consulting and health units.
