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India’s Best Commercial Directors: There is a very specific kind of memory that ad films create.
You are watching television. An ad comes on. Thirty seconds pass. And something happens in your chest. You laugh, or you feel something quiet and warm, or you just sit there and go, “that was good.” You do not know who directed it. You probably do not even know the production house. But ten years later, you can still describe that ad frame by frame.
That is what great commercial direction does. It disappears into the work.
India has produced a genuinely remarkable group of directors who have spent their careers making those thirty seconds count. Some of them became household names. Some remained behind the camera while their work became part of the cultural furniture of Indian life. A few went on to make feature films that competed at Cannes and Toronto. All of them, at some point, stood on a film set in Mumbai or Delhi or somewhere remote in Rajasthan and asked the same question: how do we make something worth watching in the time it takes someone to refill their chai?
This is their story.
Prahlad Kakkar: The Original Madman | India’s Best Commercial Directors
If you want to understand Indian advertising, you start here.
India’s Best Commercial Directors: Prahlad Kakkar founded Genesis Film Productions in 1977, after training under Shyam Benegal, one of India’s finest parallel cinema directors. The combination of Benegal’s craft and Kakkar’s own irreverent personality produced something that Indian advertising had never quite seen before: a director who genuinely did not care about conventional rules, and whose work was better for it.
As the founder of Genesis Film Productions, he brought to life campaigns for Pepsi, Maggi, Britannia, Nestle, and Coca-Cola, each laced with wit and recall value that outlived the products themselves.
The campaign most people associate with him is Pepsi’s “Yehi Hai Right Choice Baby, Aha!” More than a slogan, it became a generational catchphrase. It was playful, cheeky, and impossible to forget. Kakkar bottled up the spirit of India’s 90s youth and served it with fizz.
But there were others. The Rasna “I Love You Rasna” films. The Everest Masala campaigns. The Britannia “Ting Ting Ti Ting” jingle years. One after another, Kakkar produced work that did not just sell products. It gave those products a personality that consumers genuinely liked.
With over 30 years of experience in the ruthless advertising industry, Prahlad Kakkar remains ahead of his ilk by constantly reinventing himself. From his humble beginnings as an Accounts Executive at an ad firm in Delhi in 1971, he went on to learn the tricks of the trade from one of India’s finest filmmakers.
He is also dyslexic. He was not brilliant in academics. He never took the obvious path. And he ended up building one of India’s most storied production houses and, along the way, helped establish what Indian advertising could feel like when it trusted its own instincts.
His view on the job is simple and useful: the true test of a good advertising professional is that if you see a competitor’s film that is very well done, you wish that you had done it, and every film that you had done, you would love to do better again.
That philosophy, applied for nearly five decades, is why Genesis remains a name that matters.
Prasoon Pandey: The Poet Who Shoots Commercials
Most ad directors start in advertising. Prasoon Pandey started in life.
Raised in a home where music, poetry, drama, and folklore were part of everyday life, storytelling became second nature to him. His artistic journey began early. He was directing professional theatre while still in high school and designing large-scale light-and-sound shows in remote forts and deserts before he had finished Class 12. He went on to refine his creative instincts at the National Institute of Design, specialising in Graphic Design and Visual Communication.
His transition to commercial direction happened almost by accident. He worked as Creative Director at Lowe Lintas before a client insisted that he direct the film for a script he had written. That became his entry point. What followed was one of the most decorated careers in Indian advertising history.
His filmography includes notable campaigns like Fevicol, Fevikwik (Kabaadiwali), Asian Paints Ultima Raag Malhar, Flipkart’s Saree, and multiple memorable films for SBI Life Insurance. In 2002, he co-founded Corcoise Films.
India’s Best Commercial Directors: The Fevicol campaigns are worth pausing on. The Fevicol Bus ad, one of the most beloved Indian commercials ever made, was shot in Pushkar. There were close to 120 people sitting on that bus, with animals as well. To get the bus to sway beautifully on camera, they dug the road, put in speed breakers, and finally created ditches on alternate sides. The film ran globally on international jury circuits for years, with advertising professionals across the world citing it as an example of how cultural specificity, when executed with complete conviction, transcends culture entirely.
Prasoon Pandey holds the distinction of being the first Asian filmmaker featured in Campaign Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential advertising filmmakers worldwide. His One Black Coffee ad for Ericsson was the first Indian commercial to win at Cannes.
He has been ranked among the top 25 advertising film directors in the world by the Gunn Report. He has won at Cannes Lions, Clio Awards, New York Festivals, Spikes Asia, and AdFest.
And in 2025, he announced his feature film directorial debut, a contemporary mythological thriller. When asked why it took so long to make a feature, he said: “I really enjoy the kind of stories I get to do in advertising, which is why I haven’t done a feature film yet.”
That answer tells you everything about the man. Most directors treat advertising as a steppingstone to features. Prasoon Pandey treats it as a destination worth staying in.
Ram Madhvani: The Director Who Thinks in Ecosystems
India’s Best Commercial Directors: Ram Madhvani is the kind of commercial director who makes you feel something you did not expect to feel during an ad break.
Madhvani’s most celebrated work remains the Happydent Palace commercial from 2006, which exemplified his signature approach to transforming simple product propositions into cinematic experiences. Conceptualised by Prasoon Joshi and directed by Madhvani, the campaign demonstrated how grand creative visions could be executed with meticulous attention to craft. The campaign’s enduring appeal lies in its perfect marriage of product proposition and creative storytelling, where the brand benefit of teeth whitening was transformed into a palatial fantasy that audiences genuinely enjoyed watching.
The Happydent Palace ad is still referenced in creative reviews today, nearly two decades after it aired. That is the shelf life of genuinely great commercial work.
Madhvani takes a 360-degree approach to each brand, seamlessly blending advertising, marketing, and craft. As co-founder of Equinox Films, Madhvani represents the modern advertising director who thinks beyond traditional campaign boundaries. Equinox has a roster of six directors, including Nitin Parmar, Deb Medhekar, Sandeep Modi, Priyanka Ghose, and Tanvi Gandhi. Madhvani built a production house that functions as a creative ecosystem, not just a vehicle for his own work.
His trajectory also bridges commercial direction and long-form storytelling in a way that few directors have managed cleanly. He directed Neerja, the National Award-winning Hindi feature film about air hostess Neerja Bhanot. He received an International Emmy nomination for his thriller series Aarya, starring Sushmita Sen.
The discipline of commercial direction, the craft of making something emotionally complete in thirty seconds, is visible in every frame of that long-form work. The economy. The controlled emotion. The precise visual grammar.
Madhvani’s career is an argument that great commercial directors are not compromising by not making feature films. They are building a different and equally sophisticated kind of mastery.
Tarsem Singh: The Indian Director the World Calls a Visual God
Most people outside the advertising industry know Tarsem Singh as the director of The Cell, The Fall, or the Pepsi “We Will Rock You” campaign with Britney Spears, Beyonce, and Pink.
What they often do not know is that he is Indian. Born in Jalandhar, Punjab. Educated at Bishop Cotton School in Shimla. And the person whose commercial work sits in a permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
India’s Best Commercial Directors: Tarsem Singh began his directing career in the early 1990s with a series of visually striking commercials that established his reputation for elaborate production design and cinematic storytelling in advertising. He built a substantial portfolio with ads for Nike, Pepsi, Levi’s, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Guinness, often employing surreal, painterly aesthetics to create memorable narratives within 30-second constraints.
His Nike “Good vs. Evil” commercial, where the world’s best football players take on actual devils in a match, is one of the most ambitious pieces of commercial filmmaking ever produced. Tarsem Singh received the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials in 1997 for his work on Nike’s Good vs. Evil, Levi’s Poolboy, and Coca-Cola’s Red.
His R.E.M. “Losing My Religion” music video won six MTV Awards including Video of the Year, and a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video in 1992. He followed it by directing the Pepsi gladiator epic featuring Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” Then came The Cell. Then came The Fall, which he financed himself and shot across 18 countries over four years while continuing to do commercial work.
His commercial work is part of a permanent collection on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
No other Indian advertising director has that distinction. And it points to something important: Tarsem’s commercial work was never just advertising. It was visual art, funded by advertising. The brands understood what they were getting. They commissioned it anyway, because the results were unlike anything anyone else was producing.
He continues to direct commercials for global brands including Nike, Pepsi, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and L’Oreal. His 2021 Toyota Super Bowl ad featuring US Paralympian Jessica Long was widely cited as one of the most emotionally effective commercials of that year.
Gauri Shinde: The Director Who Made Emotion Look Effortless
Gauri Shinde is proof that the best commercial directors are not born in advertising. They are formed by looking at the world with genuine attention.
Shinde started working with advertising agencies like IBW, Bates Clarion, and Lowe Lintas, where R. Balki was the creative director. In the following years she made over 100 advertising films and short films.
Her advertising work includes the Havells cable ads, which are well-known for their emotional treatment of ordinary domestic relationships. The campaigns that Gauri brought to life during her advertising years consistently had a quality that is very hard to manufacture: they felt true. Not aspirational in a way that feels distant, but aspirational in a way that feels achievable.
India’s Best Commercial Directors: She made her directorial debut with the highly acclaimed English Vinglish (2012), which marked the comeback of actress Sridevi. The film was inspired by Shinde’s own relationship with her mother, who ran her own pickle business out of her home in Pune and was a Marathi-speaking woman who did not speak English well. As she said, “I made this film to say sorry to my mother.”
English Vinglish premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to critical acclaim. It earned her all the major Best Debut Director awards of 2012, including Filmfare and the Laadli National Media Award for Gender Sensitivity. The film was also shortlisted as India’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards.
Her second film, Dear Zindagi, starred Alia Bhatt and Shah Rukh Khan and addressed mental health in a way that Indian cinema had never quite managed before. Not as a medical issue, but as a human one.
She began her career in television production and copywriting before transitioning to advertising, where she directed notable campaigns such as the Havells cable ads, establishing herself as a prominent ad filmmaker. She later honed her filmmaking skills with studies in New York during a sabbatical from her advertising job.
What makes Gauri Shinde’s career significant in this list is not just the quality of her feature films. It is the fact that her advertising background is completely visible in them. The economy of storytelling. The instinct for the emotional beat that matters. The understanding that what you do not show is as important as what you do. These are skills that commercial directors develop over years of working within tight constraints, and they translate directly into the kind of filmmaking that moves people.
Rajiv Menon: The Cinematographer Who Directs Like a Painter
Rajiv Menon is one of those directors whose work you recognise before you know his name.
He started as a cinematographer, which shows in everything he directs. His sense of light, composition, and how a frame carries emotion is not something you learn in a directing course. You develop it by spending years behind a camera, watching how the world changes in different light, at different times of day, from different angles.
India’s Best Commercial Directors: He shot films like Minsara Kanavu and Kandukondain Kandukondain for Mani Ratnam’s production house before building his own body of commercial work. His advertising films, particularly for premium jewellery and fashion brands, consistently produce a visual quality that other directors spend considerably more to approximate.
In South Indian advertising specifically, Rajiv Menon remains a benchmark for how visual craft can carry emotional content without relying on heavy scripting or dialogue.
His directing philosophy follows from his cinematography background: the camera is not documenting an event. It is participating in one. That distinction changes everything about how a frame is constructed.
Pradeep Sarkar: The Filmmaker Who Understood Characters
Pradeep Sarkar directed Parineeta, the 2005 Hindi feature starring Saif Ali Khan and Vidya Balan, which won him the Filmfare Award for Best Director debut. But before that film, he had spent years building a reputation in advertising as a director with an unusual gift for character.
India’s Best Commercial Directors: Most commercial directors think in terms of images. Sarkar thought in terms of people. His ad films consistently had characters who felt like they had a life outside the thirty seconds you were watching. The choice of face, the gesture, the way someone stood in a kitchen or walked down a market street, all of it felt observed rather than constructed.
This gift for character is visible throughout his feature film work. And it was developed, refined, and sharpened during his advertising years.
His body of commercial work, particularly for FMCG brands in the 1990s and early 2000s, is studied today by advertising students as examples of how character-led storytelling works within tight format constraints.
Abhinay Deo: The Instinct Director
Abhinay Deo directed Delhi Belly, the 2011 Aamir Khan-produced comedy that became one of the most distinctive Hindi films of the decade. He came to it from advertising.
His commercial work is characterised by instinct and energy. Where some commercial directors build their films through meticulous pre-production, Deo’s best work has a looseness to it, a sense that the camera is catching something rather than constructing it.
India’s Best Commercial Directors: This approach works particularly well for youth-targeted brands, urban lifestyle products, and campaigns that need to feel spontaneous rather than polished. He understands tone, and he understands how to make a brand feel alive in a way that does not feel like advertising.
Several agencies working with challenger brands specifically seek out directors with Deo’s sensibility. Because when you are a smaller brand going up against an established category leader, you cannot afford to look like everybody else. You need a director who is not going to give you the safe answer.
The New Generation: Names to Watch
The ecosystem that Prahlad Kakkar and Prasoon Pandey built has produced a generation of younger directors who are doing genuinely interesting work.
Directors like Ayappa KM, Razneesh Ghai, Vivek Kakkad, Nikhil Rao, Piyush Raghani, and Shirsha Guha Thakurta are finding their own place in the industry. The campaigns they have worked on include Pepsi “Change the Game to Football,” Tata Sky “Poochhne Mein Kya Jata Hai,” Kotak “Subbu Sab Janta Hai,” and the Flipkart campaigns that have become known for their sharp, character-driven comedy.
The good news for Indian advertising is that this generation does not seem interested in simply replicating what came before. They are working in a media environment where digital-first campaigns, short-form content, and platform-specific storytelling require a different creative vocabulary. And they are developing that vocabulary with real competence.
The challenge they face is the same one every generation of commercial directors has faced: the compression of budgets in the middle tier, where most real work happens. The top-of-the-line people have become very expensive and are very busy. Hence they can be used only for big budget films. But with the coming in of new directors, even small budget films have started looking good.
That democratisation of craft is genuinely healthy for the industry. And it is producing a new cohort of directors who will, in another decade, be the names on the lists like this one.
India’s Best Commercial Directors: What Makes a Great Commercial Director?
After looking at the careers of the people on this list, a few things become clear.
India’s Best Commercial Directors: The best commercial directors are not generalists. They have a distinct visual language and a specific emotional register that agencies and brands hire them for precisely because they do it better than anyone else. Tarsem Singh’s painterly surrealism. Prasoon Pandey’s folkloric warmth. Ram Madhvani’s cinematic grandeur. Gauri Shinde’s quietly observed emotion. These are not interchangeable. A brand brief that suits one of these directors might be completely wrong for another.
The best commercial directors take the constraint seriously. Thirty seconds is not a limitation to work around. It is the form. The directors on this list built entire careers on the understanding that brevity, when applied with precision, can be as powerful as any feature film.
And the best commercial directors understand that they are not making art for themselves. They are making something that needs to work for the brand, for the audience, and for the moment it appears in. That is a more complex brief than any feature film gets. And the directors who handle it consistently, across decades and categories and changing media landscapes, are doing something genuinely difficult at the highest level.
India has been lucky with the people who have chosen this as their craft.
Cybertize Media Productions Private Limited is a full-service ad film and corporate video production company working with brands across India.
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India's Best Commercial Directors
