Ashish Banerjee tells Andrew Thomas about his unconventional childhood, his storied career and his approach to brand development. 

Photographs by Sayed Suhail

In Meerut, a vibrant and affluent city 50 miles northeast of New Delhi, 10-year-old Ashish Banerjee was picked out for special attention by the St Mary’s Academy’s librarian. The school’s rules clearly stated the lending of only one book a week, but Banerjee would regularly return home with a bulging satchel. The librarian defended her flouting of the regulations, saying “Many of the boys struggle with their one choice; this boy actually reads all the books he takes.”

This intellectual enquiry, thirst for knowledge and love of literature has remained with Banerjee throughout his life. From his offices in Dubai’s Media City quarter, the head of brand for United Arab Emirates’ challenger telecom firm, du, looks back at his school days with fond memories. “It was a fantastic education. It stressed the value of application in our work, but also sport, debates and drama were high on the agenda as well. It was a boys’ school and after 12 years we came out as fairly rounded young men because we did well academically but we also learned a lot about life through sport,” reminisces Banerjee, wistfully. “If I could have my life all over again I actually wouldn’t change any of that part of it.”

His father was an engineer, working for the Indian Railways; overseeing the building of new tracks, tunnels and bridges as the railways expanded. Banerjee was brought up by his maternal grandparents, specifically with his son’s education uppermost in the errant engineer’s mind. The transition, however, from rosy schoolboy days into university life was not a smooth one. His passion for reading steered him towards journalism but his parents fiercely opposed a career they felt had no real future. Buckling under the weight of his parent’s protests, Banerjee sat the various entrance examinations for engineering courses at different universities. It was clear he wasn’t going to follow in his father’s footsteps and ended up at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science to study economics.

Although affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one of the top 10 in India, Banerjee’s university had evolved from a technology institute, and he was disillusioned with the mandatory mathematics and engineering courses all students took in their first two years. “I dropped out, hung out with my musician friends, did a lot of theatre and wrote for the student newspaper. I made a lot of friends and generally had a good time.” Then in his third year university life changed for the better. As Banerjee recalls, “My economics’ classes started and life became interesting. Economics was intellectually stimulating and I started studying seriously.” With his course continuing to a masters degree, the next three years saw Banerjee add management to his economics studies; disciplines that were to remain with him. Equally lasting were the friendships he made during his university days. “Those friendships have lasted to this day. Many of the very good friends I made went to the States, the UK, Australia and Canada. We have regular reunions and we just pick up where we left off.”

A year before the end of his university days the former dropoutturned-model-student mapped out his future plans. “It came down to the fact that I loved the English language, the arts, psychology and I had an intrinsic love of marketing. I put all those together and it added up to advertising as a career choice.” His university had no advertising module, so again Banerjee’s time was spent in the library, reading all he could, and confirming his decision. His final thesis was called ‘Advertising & Consumer Psychology: Five Essays,’ a useful title to secure interviews with Bombay’s leading ad agencies. The biggest and the oldest was HTA, owned by, and now renamed to, JWT. “I joined them in 1986 and they had already been around for 75 years. It was a sort of University of Advertising in India. 

Banerjee knew his time was going to be limited at HTA. He’d been offered a place at New York’s Syracuse University, to add a master’s degree in advertising to the two in economics and management he’d already received. He wasn’t going to let the year be a wasted one. “I learned so much in that year. I was lucky because I got to work on Unilever and Kodak. It was so interesting and I just sucked it up. And then I left to go to the States, to study some more.”

Banerjee had wrote his master’s thesis on multinational advertising and the challenges and opportunities of European integration. He started his research in New York questioning the worldwide account directors working on some of the big global brands. During these meetings, the table was often turned and the interviewer became the interviewee. As luck would have it McCann needed someone with international experience for the Unilever account. With experience with Unilever from his time at JWT in Bombay, Banerjee was hired. Unilever invented brand management concepts, but although Banerjee continued learning during his time on the account, he wasn’t that happy. Uncertain as to the reason for his ennui, he left New York and took up an assistant professorship at the University of Texas, where he taught advertising for the next two years. He published a few papers but ultimately missed the cut and thrust of the commercial world and returned to New York in 1994.

The next three years saw him move through the agency world before finding himself at One Word Communications, formed from YAR and Kang and Lee. After his roles working on AT&T at integrated agencies, he reutrned to McCann. The agency’s HR department said they’d be happy to have him back. They were keen to post him overseas, and said they’d call when something came up. Within a week he was put up for a job as client services director in the São Paulo office. The interviews went well, some in New York and some in Miami. Banerjee was all set to fly off to South America when the Brazilian real crashed and the economy spiralled. The hire was shelved and Banerjee got back in touch with McCann’s human resources department. “As luck would have it there was a client services director role in Romania.” McCann’s human resources people didn’t really know too much about what was involved, but within weeks Banerjee was in Bucharest. For many, Romania then would have been a daunting prospect, but Banerjee describes it as career transforming, “It was fantastic. There was so much going on. So much opportunity. It was a great life.” 

McCann had only recently established itself in Romania, having acquired a local agency. Following the collapse of the Iron Curtain, advertising was still a new profession. Most of the agencies were run by expats and there was something of a frontier feel amongst practitioners. Competitive differential was a difficult concept to convey and, according to Banerjee, mainly consisted of agencies cutting each other’s margins. “After a couple of months I realised this was untenable and everyone was ruining the sector’s profitability, so I contacted the expats who were heads of agencies and invited them to an English pub called the White Horse. I bought the first round and then told them that as we came from more developed markets we needed to make a difference. We needed to lay the foundations not just of our own agencies but for the industry overall. Out of that initial meeting we formed the Romanian Association of Advertising Agencies.”

Banerjee is proud of his time in Romania, but also seems proud of how Romania has performed. “Romania has, very quickly, grown a very good creative industry, particularly in advertising. They punch above their weight,” he asserts. McCann Romania grew considerably but Banerjee describes how success was rewarded, “You either ran large accounts or you ran a large office.” In some ways he got both and was moved to London set up and run the telecoms practice for McCann and look after strategy and business development for central and eastern Europe, as well as running the Gillette account.

Unfortunately it wasn’t to last. McCann was going through a period of cost-cutting. Banerjee was set to move to McCann Jakarta but for family reasons chose to stay in the UK. He became a naturalised British citizen and set up shop as an independent consultant. His years with McCann had allowed him experience working on Saudi Aramco’s rebranding, the transformation of Celtel across Africa and the launch of MasterCard’s renowned ‘Priceless’ campaign into new markets.

But his absence left McCann with a gap that their own resources couldn’t fill. For the next 15 months the bulk of his work came from McCann and his former clients, providing brand strategy advice to the same offices through whose doors he’d regularly entered as an employee. “It was actually great fun. I made more money, I worked less and I spent more time with my family,” he says.

One McCann assignment was to Dubai, working with a former colleague, Peter Davies, who persuaded him to stop the travelling, move to Dubai and co-run McCann Promoseven 360. It was, however, the wrong move for Banerjee. Fresh from running his own consultancy and previously senior enough at McCann to make his own decisions, he then found himself unable to introduce the changes he felt were necessary.

He was approached by Lippincott, an American brand consultancy, to set up a small office in Dubai. Founded in 1943, Lippincott was the agency to first coin the phrase ‘corporate identity.’ Its U.S. pedigree is astounding and Banerjee is gushing in his praise of the organisation’s professionalism. “It was the most intense and rewarding chapter of my career. What I learned during those two years was phenomenal. Lippincott is an amazing management consultancy that works in the field of brands. They are extremely well run and staffed with some incredibly high quality people. We worked on some really good, large-scale assignments with telcos in this region. It was fantastic for somebody in their 40s to be learning so much new stuff.”

Then, in 2008 the global downturn had started. Although it would take a further year for the full effects to reach the Emirates, the beginnings of an economic conflagration that was to decimate the Middle Eastern creative services industry were already apparent. “By then we had won the du brand strategy revamp project. We were finishing our work on du’s brand strategy and the management team asked if I wanted to go in-house and take the work forward. In many ways it was incredibly fortuitous because Lippincott ended up closing the office in Dubai and so in a serendipitous way it all worked out for me,” he says.

Banerjee has been with du for almost six years now. There’s no sign of any desire to return to the agency world, and even less desire to return to advertising, “Brand development work is much more substantive than advertising work. It is wider reaching and intellectually more stimulating. It’s more behavioural than communications-oriented and I have learned so much in the last 10 years of my life. What I’ve tried to do here is bring New York/ London standards to the development of the du brand, and thanks to my team and colleagues its worked well for us.”

Its been a great run: du’s brand health index and value have tripled during his tenure and it is acknowledged as one of the leading brands in the Middle East. Du was recently awarded gold for ‘Best brand evolution’ and the grand prix at the inaugural Transform Awards MENA 2014. Earlier this year he was invited by Vodafone and Telia Sonera to share the story of du’s brand development success at their global brand conferences. 

Banerjee is incredibly well respected in the region. Everyone seems to know him – and like him. This seems to have been a constant factor throughout his career. He’s a man who values his friendships and has kept in touch with many former colleagues. The areas that so excited him as a student at St Mary’s Academy back in India haven’t deserted him, either. A regular cricketer with his Dubai club he’s proud to point out the bowling prize he won last year. He is a keen amateur jazz percussionist, and has played in the Dubai Jazz Festival twice. And, as a published poet, his love of English literature, the passion that drew him back from becoming an engineer and sent him down the marketing and communications path thirty years ago, still plays an important part in his life. His first book, ‘The Enduring Brand,’ is ready for publication and we’ll probably hear more about him in the near future.