Bengaluru: Jishnu Sen, veteran advertising and marketing professional and former President and CEO of Grey India, passed away in the early hours of Sunday morning following a prolonged ailment.
The news of his passing was shared on social media by his cousin Shubho Sengupta, who remembered Sen as someone with a “long and distinguished career in advertising and marketing”. He said that despite dealing with an ailment over the past few years, Sen continued to live with “tremendous life force”.
Sen’s career spanned more than three decades across advertising, brand strategy, retail marketing and growth advisory. He began his agency journey at JWT in 1992 before moving to Young & Rubicam, where he served as Regional Account Director in New York and led the Colgate business across Asia Pacific.
A defining phase of his career came at Grey, where he rose from heading the Mumbai office to COO and eventually President and CEO of the group in India. He led Grey India from 2007 to 2014, with a mandate covering the advertising and digital businesses, while also setting up an activation and shopper marketing offering.
During his tenure, Grey more than doubled in size and broke into the top five of Campaign’s Agency of the Year rankings, according to Sen’s LinkedIn profile. In 2014, he was also named among The Economic Times’ 20 most important advertising and media professionals.
Following his agency career, Sen moved to the client side as Director, Brand Strategy at Essar Telecom Retail. In 2017, he joined Big Bazaar, Future Retail, as Chief Marketing Officer, a role he held for three years.
The later chapter of his career saw him work closely with consumer-tech companies and emerging businesses. He served as Growth and Marketing Advisor to Porter from 2021 to 2025 and also advised Bergner India. More recently, he was associated with DealShare and L’amar as a marketing consultant.
Describing the shift to consumer-tech start-ups as a “paradigm shift” in his professional journey, Sen said the experience had added growth marketing to his long-standing expertise in brand building and communications. He continued to mentor businesses on growth strategy and building strong brand universes.
Over the years, Sen worked across brands and businesses including Future Group, Pepsi, GSK, Yum Foods, Colgate-Palmolive, Britannia, Reliance Telecom and Ferrero. His career reflected the evolution of modern marketing itself — from traditional agency account management and brand communication to retail, digital, growth and consumer-tech strategy.
Sen described himself as “passionate about building brands” and as a “strategic marketer by training and business leader by choice”.
His passing marks the loss of a widely experienced industry leader whose work connected agency creativity, brand strategy and business growth across India and international markets.
