AD Agencies
Nitin Karkare inherits Ulka after merger reorganisation
MUMBAI: When global advertising giants collide, careers get crushed and brands get binned. Nitin Karkare has emerged from the Omnicom-IPG merger reorganisation with a promotion—and a legacy agency that has just lost its surname.
The 38-year veteran has been named chairman of Ulka and executive director at Omnicom Advertising India, a double-barrelled title that reflects both his longevity and the awkwardness of integrating two feuding empires. The catch? Ulka is no longer FCB Ulka. The FCB brand has been retired globally, and the agency Karkare has called home since 1986 now sits under the BBDO group. It is a bit like waking up to find your house has been moved to a different neighbourhood whilst you slept.
Karkare joined FCB Ulka as a management trainee fresh out of business school and never really left—save for a brief sortie to Everest Advertising in the early 1990s, where he managed the Procter & Gamble account before scurrying back to Ulka in 1993. He was named chief executive in 2016, a role he has held through industry upheaval, digital disruption, and now corporate consolidation. Colleagues describe him as calm and composed, which is advertising-speak for “doesn’t panic when the roof caves in.”
His client roster reads like a who’s who of Indian corporate life: Amul, Tata Motors, Zee, ITC, Wipro, Zodiac. These are not accounts you hand to the ambitious upstart. They are the sort of relationships that take decades to build and require the patience of a man who reads Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsyth for fun. Karkare, by all accounts, is that man.
The broader restructuring sees Prasoon Joshi elevated to chairman of Omnicom Advertising India, whilst Aditya Kanthy becomes president and managing director, taking operational command of the merged entity’s India business. Both will report to Sean Donovan, president of the global operation. S Subramanyeswar (known as Subbu, because Indian advertising loves a nickname) takes on dual duties as chief strategy officer for India and chief knowledge officer for Asia. It is a reshuffle that signals serious integration intent.
The Omnicom-IPG merger, announced earlier this year, has triggered a global realignment as the combined entity eliminates overlap and consolidates its creative networks under BBDO, TBWA and McCann. In India, that means saying goodbye to FCB and hello to a new organisational chart. Whether clients notice—or care—remains to be seen.
For Karkare, the appointment is both validation and challenge. He gets to steer Ulka through its most significant identity crisis in decades whilst navigating the politics of a freshly merged holding company. If his four decades of steady hands-on leadership are any guide, he will manage it with the same unflappable demeanour that has defined his career. If not, well, there is always another thriller to read.
AD Agencies
Kevin Vaz opens FICCI-EY report with a declaration: India’s M&E industry set to breach Rs 3 trillion mark by 2027
In a keynote address at the FICCI-EY report launch, Kevin Vaz says sport, AI and the connected TV boom are driving a multi-screen revolution with no signs of slowing
MUMBAI: India’s media and entertainment industry is growing faster than the economy, reshaping global benchmarks and is on course to blow past Rs 3 trillion by 2027. That was the headline message from Kevin Vaz, chairman of the FICCI Media and Entertainment Committee and chief executive of entertainment at JioStar, who delivered the opening keynote at the launch of the FICCI-EY Media and Entertainment Report 2026 in Mumbai on Monday. He did not waste much time on caveats.
The industry hit Rs 2.78 trillion in 2025, outpacing GDP per capita growth and surpassing even last year’s bullish forecasts. Vaz described the year in three words: scale, convergence, transformation. The numbers, he suggested, were only half the story. The other half was how that growth was happening.
Digital has become the industry’s largest segment, driven by advertising, subscriptions and commerce. But Vaz was quick to puncture the familiar narrative of digital killing everything else. India, he argued, is not an either-or market. It is an AND market. Connected TV is surging. Linear television, mobile, films and print are all still expanding. AVGC, the animation, visual effects, gaming and comics sector, is emerging as a serious growth engine, opening new storytelling formats and new global revenue streams. Nothing, he said, is replacing anything. Everything is reinforcing everything else.
Nowhere is that more vivid than in sport. In an on-demand world where audiences can watch anything, anytime, Indians still show up live. “Sports don’t fragment audiences,” Vaz said. “They unite them, just on different screens.” The ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 made the point emphatically. During the final, JioHotstar delivered 72.5 million concurrent streams, a global record. Group chats exploded. Families renegotiated control of the television. Advertisers, Vaz noted with undisguised relish, stopped asking where audiences were and started asking how fast they could get in.
Cinema had its own landmark year. More than 1,900 films were released, with several crossing the Rs 1 billion mark. Dhurandhar was singled out as proof that Indian audiences will still turn up in large numbers for content that grips them. Live experiences, too, are getting bigger and more immersive, though Vaz suggested the surface has barely been scratched.
Then there is artificial intelligence, which he described as quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, reshaping everything. AI is enabling personalisation, efficiency and scale, but Vaz argued its deeper significance lies in what it is doing to creativity itself. He pointed to Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh, billed as the world’s first AI-produced show, as evidence that the technology can amplify creative ambition rather than hollow it out. He also used the platform to call on Indian policymakers to engage seriously with the creative industry on AI and copyright, ensuring that creators are fairly compensated as the technology spreads.
The picture that emerges from the report, and from Vaz’s keynote, is of an industry that has stopped thinking of itself as a fast-growing emerging market and started thinking of itself as a global template. Scale, diversity and innovation, he said, are no longer in tension in India. They are coexisting, and the rest of the world is taking notes.
The Rs 3 trillion milestone is two years away. As the man who chairs the committee that shapes the industry’s policy agenda and runs the country’s most powerful entertainment platform, Vaz set the tone for the day with characteristic directness: India’s media business is not just chasing growth. It is deciding what the country talks about at dinner. That is a different kind of power altogether.
