AD Agencies
Bates CHI&Partners to acquire Temple Advertising
MUMBAI: Bates CHI&Partners announces it has agreed to acquire the business and assets of Temple Advertising, a boutique advertising agency based in Bangalore.
“Bates CHI&Partners defined business mission is to create big Ideas for ambitious brands,” said Bates CHI&Partners CEO David Mayo. “In developing our strategy in India we are building a creative network with scale,” he added. “Temple is a renowned creative agency with a strong reputation and a broad vision of the world and with them around the table, we will deliver on this promise.”
Temple is a Bangalore-based advertising boutique agency co-founded in 2004 by Manmohan Anchan, Vidur Vohra and Srikanth VS.
Srikanth VS will become CEO and Manmohan Anchan will become CCO of Bates CHI&Partners in India and they will jointly assume the role of managing partner of the group overseeing all five Bates CHI&Partners offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata and Dhaka.
Srikanth said, “We are incredibly excited to be part of a new agency set up in a new India environment and we hope to capture this new mood to build our business.”
To underline the partnership and collaboration principles of this company, the agencies in Bangalore will merge and become Bates CHI&Temple, with the rest of the network retaining the original Bates CHI&Partners branding.
Anchan said, “At Temple, we pride ourselves on our work. If it sells, it’s working. If it builds a brand, it’s working. We don’t create work for clients or juries, we create work that works. The time is right for a new agency in India to give variety to the current order of things.”
Temple has worked with clients across diverse categories such as automotive, education, fashion and retail, FMCG, foods, media & entertainment, real estate and technology. Their clients include Embassy Group, eTV Kannada, Future Lifestyle Fashions (including Indigo Nation, Scullers, Manchester United, Jealous21), Pearson Education, Reliance Trends, Sumeru Frozen Foods, TVS Motors, Vaswani Group and Wipro Technologies.
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.
