MAM
Taproot India hooks strategy & biz head Sameer Aasht
MUMBAI: Creative hotshop Taproot India has tapped into another talent by roping in Sameer Aasht to come in as its head of strategy & business. Aasht joined the agency, according to his linkedin profile, in March 2013.
Over the past year of so, Sameer has been been playing entrepreneur, founding loveknits.org (which focuses on empowering designers, artisans and NGOs to leverage professional marketing expertise and a brand-led, digital migration approach to go global with their hand made / eco friendly creations) and Alma Mater PLC (which seeks to offer brand consultancy to start-ups and turnarounds).
Before turning entrepreneur, Sameer put in workexp across a range of design, communication, brand consulting agencies, and even worked in marketing on the client side at Jet Airways, where he worked with cross functional teams to launch the brand in North America, Europe, west Asia as well south east Asia apart from launching consumer segment focused brand experiences.
Among the agencies he has worked with include Percept/H (where he headed strategic planning) and Landor Associates’ India office (heading strategy). But his largest stints have been with communication agencies like TBWA, Ambience Publicis, Contract, Ogilvy and Rediffusion Y&R. Among the brands he has been deeply involved with figure: HSBC, Cadbury’s, Asian Paints, Mahindra, Volvo-Eicher, Suzlon, World Gold Council, Visa Monetize (Movida), Unilever’s Elle18, Pantaloons, Kansai Nerolac, Samsonite, Black & Decker, DeWalt, Tata Water (Himalayan), Times of India and FICCI. An MBA from ITM, Sameer is also an IIM-A alumnus.
Taproot’s chief creative officer & co-founder Agnello Dias says that “Sameer‘s wealth of experience and strategic acumen will add even more muscle to everything that Taproot India brings to the table and look forward to client’s continued cooperation in creating powerful value for their brands.”
His partner at Taproot Santoh Padhi (who carries the same title as him) adds that Sameer’s experience “working on all four sides of the table – advertising, marketing, design and digital” across a diverse set of categories ranging across tourism and hospitality, FMCG, automotive, financial services, fashion, retail and luxury is a big plus for their agency.”
Says Sameer: “Taproot is a dream agency for most professionals in the industry today. I absolutely look forward to co-creating the best solutions for the brands we handle.”
“One of the first things, Aggie and Padhi should put him to work on is getting their website http://www.taprootindia.co.in/ working, apart from working on brands,” says an advertising industry observer. “The site is under construction. And that’s not looking good for a crack creative agency such as Taproot which pushes the envelope on almost everything.”
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.
