Sandeep Madan, the chief executive officer of The Partnership Africa, might have stumbled upon a career in advertising and marketing, but snatching Airtel Africa from WPP-ScanGroup was far from a fluke.
When news emerged that some former employees of WPP-ScanGroup, one of the leading advertising agencies, had secured the tender to become Airtel Africa's advertising and marketing agency from their erstwhile employer, critics were not amused by the coincidence.
After all, poaching of clients by former employees is the new normal.
Somehow, WPP-ScanGroup had an iron grip on Airtel, having acted as the telecom operator’s marketing and advertising agency for 15 years.
But there was some method in the madness, as Madan himself would put it. Not only did the hiring process take 13 months of rigorous vetting, but The Partnership Africa, though new, had another advantage over the other bidders: its partners already had a deep relationship with Airtel Africa.
What most critics might not have realised is that all along Airtel’s long journey with WPP ScanGroup—from its cradle in India, as it crossed the expanse of the Indian Ocean to the African continent—one man was always behind the telecom’s operator like its shadow.
And years later, this man would feature as the brains behind one of the most daring corporate coups against his former employer. His name is Sandeep Madan.
“So, while it may seem a coincidence (that it is the former employees who won the contract from WPP), it is not,” he says.
Mr Madan's casual dressing and clean-shaven head scream, ‘a free spirit’ who believes, as the father of advertising, David Ogilvy did, ‘genius should be tolerated.’
In the 45 minutes of the interview, Mr Madan comes off as a master of one-liners. He relished throwing punchy and wistful phrases for effect, just as impactful adverts do.
He reminisced at length on the transformation of the advertising landscape over the last 30 years, convinced that the only way for this tree to grow fresh leaves is by going back to its roots.
“The agency of the future is the agency of the past,” he says.
He regrets the fragmentation that has hit the industry as each branch—public relations, media and advertising—chases its profits.
His heart aches for a return to the good old days when all the branches of the advertising industry would have a seat at the table with decision-makers, to outline the business problem.
“Once you identify the problem, you will be able to come up with a solution that may or may not require advertising,” he said.
Human spirit
If it is the fear of technology that has driven the industry to the embrace of fragmentation, Mr Madan has Bob Marley-like advice: there is no reason to fear technology as it can never replace the mind.
“Our business is based on our human spirit, our understanding, our observation and the instinct that comes with it, given all the data, given all the research that we have at hand.”
“So, no AI (Artificial Intelligence) can replace my mind, but AI is an amazing tool,” he adds.
Mr Madan has been associated with Airtel for more than 20 years, while at WPP-ScanGroup. He would then jump ship to The Partnership Group Africa, a part of the French multinational agency Publicis Group Africa.
Airtel is not only the reason he came to Africa, but it is also the reason he and his wife fell in love with the continent.
In India, he used to work for an advertising agency in which the British advertising conglomerate WPP, had a 40 percent shareholding. It is this agency that launched Airtel in the 1990s.
In 2000, when the small Indian advertising agency he worked for did its first advert for Airtel, Mr Madan was still young, but part of the team.
“So when it (Airtel) was coming to Africa, that is how we came to Africa. Because we had past experience and so on,” he explains.
He was the MD for Ogilvy Africa a year and a half, before he was moved to head ScanGroup’s wholly owned subsidiaries Scanad &J. Walter Thompson East Africa, between 2012 and 2023.
“But I was still associated with the brand (Airtel Africa). Because we used to look after the brand in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda,” he explains.
“So, it is not a coincidence that this brand (Airtel), me and my creative partners Dipesh [Jha] have been associated with it for more than 20 years.”
Dipesh held a similar role at Scanad between 2018 and 2023, and previously served as creative head at both Scanad and JW Thompson.
The Partnership’s chief operations officer, Sally Sawe, served as the managing director at Scanad and JW Thompson between 2015 and 2023. Before he was bitten by the advertising bug, Madan was a once a rally driver.
In the early 80s and early 90s, he would never have pictured himself in an advertising agency racking his head over how to ‘Keep it simple, stupid,’ a rallying call for advertisers to be simple to get the attention of people bogged down by an information overload.
Yet, he no longer gets the thrills from the vroom of cars like in the days of his youth, when he would drive across the entire breadth of India’s upcountry, stopping to meet people and have drinks.
“I happened to chance upon this industry. I was not a qualified advertising or communications student,” he says.
It is what he calls a “bad accident” that got him into the advertising world of the Mad Men in the mid-90s.
Indeed, Mr Madan joined the industry in the days of Mad Men, an acclaimed American television drama series that focused on advertising executives at the fictional Sterling Cooper agency.
“I am using mad men because there were very few mad women in those days,” he says with a chuckle.
“There used to be these executives who would smoke a cigar and they would decide, ‘This is what will be the advertising line for selling lubricants to attract truck drivers.’ And it would be in English,” he remembers.
And although he never wanted anything to do with rallies after the accident, it his love for cars, the travels and interaction with people on his cross-country drives, that set him on a successful career in the advertising world.
The ad line by the executives troubled him. First, the advert was in English, yet most truck drivers in India could barely speak or understand the language of their coloniser. And for those who spoke, this dialect in the advertisement was very different from the local languages.
His seniors agreed with him, and the campaign they launched thereafter was successful. Mr Madan was cruising smoothly into the advertising world. But what got him really started was a campaign to introduce Škoda Auto, an automobile from the Czech Republic, in India, at a time when German machines were all the craze. Indians preferred to buy these cars secondhand.
“People didn’t even know how to pronounce Skoda, even I didn’t,” he remembers.
Having done some background research on Skoda, and the car industry in India generally, Mr Madan thought that the car would not be sold through advertising in India.
Instead, he pushed for the equivalent of using what today are influencers to win over Indians. And that is how they won the tender for Skoda. And that is how Madan plunged into the mad men's world.
