The untold story of how Piyush Pandey dreamt up the IPL before anyone else

New Delhi: If there was ever a man who could sell emotion with a moustache, a smile, and a line that stuck to your heart like Fevicol, it was Piyush Pandey. The man who taught India how to laugh, cry, and feel through ads left the world on October 24, 2025, but not before leaving behind stories that sound almost mythical. 

One of those stories begins not in a boardroom or a brainstorming session, but on a cricket field.

Piyush Pandey didn’t just play cricket; he lived it. To him, the sport was not a weekend indulgence or a hobby; it was a guru, a philosophy, a way of thinking. 

Long before he was the creative giant at Ogilvy, he was a young man in flannels, chasing red leather across the grounds of Jaipur and Delhi, dreaming of cover drives more than college degrees.

"Cricket was my greatest teacher," he often said. "It taught me teamwork, patience, leadership, and the ability to find opportunity in adversity."

And perhaps, somewhere between those lessons, it also taught him how to imagine one of India’s biggest spectacles, the Indian Premier League.

The idea that hit before the sixes did

In the mid-1990s, when advertising in India was still learning to wear colour TV, Piyush, along with his friends, cricketer Arun Lal and sports administrator Amrit Mathur, had a crazy idea. 

What if cricket became more than just cricket? What if it became a festival, a carnival of lights, music, city pride, and fandom? What if, instead of countries, cities competed, and the match was only half the entertainment?

That idea would later be called the Indian Premier League.

At that time, Lalit Modi was running Modi Entertainment Networks and working with Walt Disney. Piyush and his friends met him with their vision, teams representing cities, matches under floodlights, women and men cheering alike, and cricket as a show as much as a sport.

Modi took their concept note to the BCCI, but the board brushed it aside. It was too new, too different, too early. The politics of the day drowned out the dream.

Years later, when Zee TV tried its hand with the Indian Cricket League (ICL) and failed, Modi, by then part of the BCCI, remembered that note. "Let’s pull out that old idea," he told Piyush. Together, they reworked it, sharpened it, and pitched again. The rest, as India knows, was a thunderous cheer across stadiums and screens, the birth of the IPL.

Carnival outside the boundary, pure cricket inside

When the BCCI called for pitches for IPL branding, Ogilvy almost missed the shot. A miscommunication led Piyush and his team to turn up with a presentation about the agency instead of creative work. But when the error was realised, the BCCI gave them 48 hours to come back.

Those two days became legend in Indian advertising. Piyush’s team stayed awake, scribbling lines, shaping thoughts, and finding a phrase that would define the league forever: "Carnival outside the boundary, pure cricket inside."

That line wasn’t written by an adman trying to sell a tournament; it was written by a cricketer who knew what the game felt like under floodlights, who understood that the roar of the crowd was also part of cricket’s heartbeat.

The campaign that followed, Karmayudh, sealed Ogilvy’s fate as IPL’s storyteller. The agency went on to handle not just the league but also three of its first teams, Rajasthan Royals, Mumbai Indians, and Deccan Chargers. For Piyush, this wasn’t a conflict of interest; it was a family reunion. "If one team is the toothbrush and another is the toothpaste," he’d joke, "they only work better together."

A bat, a lesson, and a legacy

For Piyush, cricket wasn’t just a sport; it was a metaphor for life, leadership, and creativity. He often spoke of a Delhi University final match where his team, St. Stephen’s, was 53 for 6. As he walked in to bat, his friend Arun Lal told him, "For ordinary people, 53 for 6 is a problem. For someone who wants to be great, it’s an opportunity." Piyush went on to score 71.

That line, in adversity lies opportunity, would stay with him forever. In advertising, it became his creed.

When his father scolded him for wasting time on the game, saying, "You can’t eat a bat for a meal," Piyush would laugh years later and say, "I wish I could tell him that now I’m eating a bat for a meal."

His deep love for the sport even helped India win the ICC World Cup hosting bid for 2011. Instead of a PowerPoint presentation, Piyush’s team designed a coffee-table book showing cricket in the lanes and gullies of India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, photographs that said what money couldn’t: Here, cricket is not a game. It’s life.

And the bid won.

The man who made cricket sell emotion

Piyush Pandey’s ads never felt like ads. They felt like memories. From the girl dancing on the field in the Cadbury Dairy Milk commercial to the thunderous energy of the IPL, his work captured the soul of India. He didn’t borrow from foreign playbooks; he borrowed from Indian streets, from the smell of rain on a pitch, from the joy of shared celebration.

His genius lay in connecting everyday emotions with cultural icons, be it cricket, festivals, or family. In many ways, the IPL wasn’t just a cricket tournament for him; it was a metaphor for modern India, young, loud, emotional, and unashamedly celebratory.

The final over

When we look back at the phenomenon that the IPL became, its glamour, its chaos, its unending applause, it’s easy to forget that somewhere behind it all stood an adman from Jaipur with a cricket bat in his heart.

For Piyush Pandey, cricket wasn’t merely a sport. It was storytelling. It was strategy. It was sound, colour, crowd, and creativity rolled into one.

And if the IPL is the carnival that brought India together, perhaps it’s because it was first imagined by a man who knew that the line between sport and emotion is just a boundary rope.

Piyush may have left the field, but the game he helped invent and the spirit he taught advertising will play on