MAM
Lowe Lintas appoints Naveen Gaur as COO
MUMBAI: MullenLowe Lintas Group has announced the elevation of Naveen Gaur as the chief operating officer, Lowe Lintas. He was until now the president of Lowe Lintas in charge of the New Delhi (NCR) operations.
Effective immediately, Naveen would oversee Lowe Lintas’ offices in New Delhi (NCR), Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. He continues to be based in New Delhi and will report to Raj Gupta, whose elevation to CEO, Lowe Lintas was announced a few days back.
Commenting on the appointment, MullenLowe Lintas Group chairman & CEO Joseph George said: “Naveen has played a significant role in strengthening Lowe Lintas’ operations of New Delhi (NCR) and has had an incredibly successful run the past 5 years. His proven track record of driving growth and creative excellence makes him a very strong support for the Lowe Lintas leadership of Arun Iyer and Raj Gupta as we put in place an ambitious and futuristic roadmap for the agency.”
Commenting on his appointment, Naveen Gaur said: “It’s a great opportunity and a privilege to further strengthen this great agency, as we move into this ever changing dynamic business environment. I look forward to partnering with Arun and Raj to drive this agenda.”
Naveen joined Lowe Lintas in 2010 as Branch Head, Delhi. Over the years, he has built a strong team of professionals and encouraged an entrepreneurial culture of growth and creative excellence. Under his leadership, the Delhi office added clients like OLX, Sun Pharma, Pernod Ricard, Cargill Foods, Google among others over the past few years. He even led his team to win major accolades across effectiveness award shows each year over the past seven years.
In a career spanning over two decades, Naveen has built a startup health and wellness, been the Chief Growth Officer at McCann Worldgroup India, and Business Director (at McCann) for clients such as Coca-Cola, Mastercard, Microsoft, Reckitt & Colman, General Motors, Bacardi, Dabur amongst others.
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.
