I won't lie to you… i didn't think that India really needed that much advertising. I mean, with a billion people, thousands of language dialects, different religious sectors, I couldn't imagine anything more daunting than advertising for Indian people. But Piyush Pandey changed that for me in a way I had never thought about. He said it's more about the emotions than it is about anything else.

Pandey is the creative director of Ogilvy and Mather Indian and has been named the most influential man in Indian advertising for the last seven years. I feel he got something right and if you watch his adverts, then you can understand just what he got right.

He explains that his approach is not about language or gender, but about humour and what he calls the 9 emotions into which every emotion can be included. I would've thought he was joking if I hadn't seen one of his adverts before hearing him speak.

Pandey manages to take the audience on a journey with the adverts he does. He doesn't tell the audience what to think, he simply gives them something to believe in and work with and he says that if you can create that journey then you have managed to come upon something amazing.

If I had the creative ability, then after hearing Pandey speak I would probably consider advertising, but I think I'll leave it to the professionals like himself who have managed to cross language and cultural barriers and bring us advertisements about superglue and insurance in a way that could appeal not to the intellect, but to the heart.

Because according to Pandey, the heart is the one thing that we all have in common.