Bobby Sista had once said, “I did not have an MBA Degree. I had neither training nor experience of running an agency. Common sense was my only qualification and personality and people skills my assets.” Ad veteran Shambhu Venkatrao Sista, who was popularly known as Bobby Sista, passed away on July 27. He had served as iconic ad agency Sista’s managing director and was responsible for its turnaround in the 1970s.
Sista, who was in his 90s, helped built Sista Advertising Agency, an agency founded by his father, into an independent advertising powerhouse. He sold the ad business to Saatchi & Saatchi in 1998.
Sista had said, “From the time I took over in 1970, 1 was clear in my mind that Sista’s would be known for and compete on the quality of our creative output. All the executives knew that creative would not be over ruled by the executives or even by the client.”
A recipient of multiple awards, in 2015, he was awarded with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI). Sista also founded ‘Population First’ in March 2002 dedicated to women empowerment, gender equality, and community mobilisation.
Ad man and director of Learning Curve, Amit Kumar Shrivastava, said, “There are two things I remember about a conversation with Bobby Sista. ‘When you get off a cab and shut the door, check if you have closed it properly as a courtesy to the driver. Otherwise the driver will have to get down and come back all the way to do it and he handles so many passengers a day!'”
“The second was about how to tell someone your phone number! There is (was?) actually a ‘proper’ way to club the numbers together when telling someone! ‘The doubles & triples in a number (like a double 4 or triple 6) mess with this etiquette!’ he frowned. This was long before mobile phones came to our lives. (Must check on how to do it now!)”
Shrivastava added, “Thirty years later, as a heavy cab user, I am happy to claim I am a very mindful cab door closer and every time for a fraction of a second, I remember Bobby while doing so!”
In 1951, Sista went to London to attend an International Advertising Conference as a Youth Delegate and he stayed on for two years to do a course in Advertising and work in an advertising agency.
In his 2015 speech after receiving the AAAI Lifetime Achievement Award, Sista had shared that after he returned to India, he oined Sista as an Account Executive and was looking forward eagerly to applying to his job, the knowledge and experience gained in London. The account that gave him the most pleasure and satisfaction was a product (an optical whitener) called TINOPAL (later became Ranipal).
Sista had recalled in his speech, “I was lucky enough to launch Tinopal. I was even luckier with the client, (a dream client) who gave me complete freedom to write my own creative brief, for the choice of media and determining the budget. For a budget of Rs 13 lakhs (a big sum in those days) I was able to virtually saturate the media in all the main languages. The most notable feature of this account was that advertising drove distribution and not the other way round.”