AD Agencies
Adsgrove Digital appoints Aanchal Kapoor as chief executive
GURGAON: Aanchal Kapoor, who spent over a decade at media houses including GroupM, Madison and OMD, has been named chief executive of Adsgrove Digital, a Gurgaon marketing agency betting that brands can no longer afford to separate storytelling from sales.
Kapoor joins founder Rajkumar Singh, formerly vice president at ANS Commerce, to lead the agency’s branding and performance operations. Her appointment signals Adsgrove’s push into what it calls “brandformance”, a clunky portmanteau meant to capture the fusion of long-term brand building with short-term performance metrics.
“Creativity gives brands their soul; data gives them direction,” said Kapoor, who has worked with LG, Shell, Bose, Honda and Duracell. “Our mission at Adsgrove is to blend both seamlessly to deliver meaningful, measurable impact.”
The agency’s pitch is straightforward: every rupee spent on advertising should be tracked, optimised and justified. Kapoor’s mantra, “Each penny needs to be counted, and we’re making it count,” reflects the pressure marketers face to prove return on investment in real time.
Adsgrove offers the usual menu of services (branding, performance marketing, social media, search optimisation) but claims to stand apart by refusing to treat brand building and direct response as separate disciplines. The agency uses automation and analytics dashboards to tweak campaigns on the fly, and has adopted what it calls “search everywhere optimisation”, adding answer engines, generative search and voice to traditional search engine work.
Whether “brandformance” catches on as more than jargon remains to be seen. But Kapoor’s appointment suggests that agencies, like their clients, are done treating brand awareness and sales conversions as if they live on different planets.
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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.
