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Interface communications launches new campaign Nivea launches Men
MUMBAI: NIVEA India, an affiliate of Beiersdorf AG, has launched a brand new campaign for NIVEA Men Fresh Active Deodorant.
The campaign features Arjun Rampal who is the face of NIVEA MEN and follows the codes of simplicity and attempts to break the monotony in one-dimensional category like deodorants. The campaign kicks off on television as well as digital media and further builds the new brand platform: It starts with you.
Speaking on the launch of the campaign, NIVEA India MD Rakshit Hargave said: “The NIVEA MEN deodorant campaign highlights the new brand proposition of IT STARTS WITH YOU very well. Essentially, the platform IT STARTS WITH YOU urges Indian men to unlock their everyday potential and take charge of their lives. Arjun Rampal, our latest addition to the NIVEA family, fits seamlessly into the brand values as he too is selfmade & juggles multiple roles in life. He personifies masculinity, success & self confidence, all qualities which a NIVEA MAN represents.”
Commenting on being the part of the ad campaign, Arjun Rampal said, ‘‘I always endorse brands & products that I use personally. The new NIVEA MEN range is a wonderful exciting range & definitely something that I use regularly. This new deodorant commercial is a very energetic film with a tongue in cheek humor about it. Most deodorant ads show men spraying the deodorant and girls falling over them. All that happens in this ad too, but wait for the last line.”
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The campaign is conceptualized by ECD Robby Mathew and creative director & copywriter Rakesh Menon of Interface communications and the production company is Future East Film.
MAM
AI could unlock billions for India’s $30 billion media industry, says JioStar vice-chairman Uday Shankar
JioStar vice-chairman urges industry to seize once-in-a-generation AI moment to turn India into the world’s creative capital
DELHI: India’s media industry stands at a historic inflection point. Artificial intelligence, long discussed as a technological disruptor, could now become the lever that propels the country from a domestic content giant to a global creative powerhouse.
Delivering the keynote at the IndiaAI Impact Summit, Uday Shankar argued that AI offers India a once-in-a-generation opportunity to lead, not follow, in global media and entertainment.
Shankar credited the prime minister’s vision for centring India’s growth agenda around AI and described the summit as overdue . Drawing on three decades in media, he traced the industry’s transformation from the arrival of the first newsroom computers to the launch of India’s earliest digital platforms, each wave of technology reshaping speed, scale and audience engagement.
The numbers tell a story of staggering growth. In just 25 years, India’s media and entertainment sector has expanded from a few billion dollars to become the world’s fifth-largest market, contributing more than $30bn to the economy. Television households have jumped from about 70m to over 210m, with more than 800m video consumers today.
Yet global influence remains elusive. While South Korea exported Squid Game and Parasite to worldwide acclaim, and Puerto Rico produced the most-streamed artist on the planet, India has struggled to consistently break through beyond its domestic and diaspora audiences .
The constraints are structural. Hollywood studio productions command budgets of $65m to $100m, with tentpoles running as high as $300m. The average Indian film operates on $3m to $5m . A marquee US television episode can cost $20m to $30m; an Indian serial is typically produced for Rs 7 lakh to Rs 10 lakh per episode, roughly $10,000. The capital gap, Shankar argued, has narrowed ambition and limited global competitiveness.
AI, he said, changes the equation by rewiring the three pillars of the industry: content, consumer and commerce.
On content, AI-powered production is collapsing infrastructure costs and accelerating timelines. At JioStar, the company recently produced Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh, a 100-episode live-action series delivered three to five times faster than a traditional production pipeline. The implication is stark. The remaining constraint is no longer capital, but imagination.
On consumers, AI enables conversational discovery, interactive storytelling and regionalisation that goes beyond simple dubbing to reflect India’s linguistic texture. On commerce, it unlocks granular segmentation and dynamic pricing, moving beyond the blunt instruments of subscription and advertising that have defined the industry for a century.
The prize is vast. The global media market, currently worth nearly $3trn, is projected to reach $3.5trn by 2029. India’s share remains under 2 per cent. Even a shift to 5 per cent would generate tens of billions of dollars in additional value.
But Shankar cautioned that opportunity does not guarantee outcome. He called for three commitments: self-disruption before external disruption, aggressive skilling to create AI-native creative hybrids, and policy frameworks that accelerate rather than constrain innovation.
Hollywood’s defensive posture towards AI, he suggested, offers India a rare window to design the business models and regulatory frameworks that could set global precedents. The shift in advantage, he argued, favours nations with deep cultural reservoirs and massive audiences.
The question is no longer whether India can lead in the AI age of media, he concluded, but whether it will move fast enough to claim that position.
The stories were always here. Now the technology has caught up.
