Brands
Faber Castell’s ‘Change the Canvas’ gets 200% more responses than last year
MUMBAI: While the digital era has disrupted many traditional businesses, stationery, and art & craft facilities are going to grow, Faber Castell India marketing India director Nisha Sara Jose told Indiantelevision.com about the second successful season of its online ‘Change the Canvas’ activity.
“Our products will continue to grow because there has been a discovery for analogue writing. It is a counter-trend, which is becoming very important and popular within the younger audience. They are going back to activities like writing and drawing to balance their (digital-dominated) lives. Also, Faber Castell as a brand is all about creativity, thoughts, and passion. So, we already are positioned on the top to tackle the digital era,” Jose quipped
Jose shared that the online creative competition, which encouraged the people to ‘change’ their choice of canvas and instead pick any ordinary object, scene, place, or setting, and look at it from a different perspective, received an impressive response of 200 per cent more from the past year.
“We received more than 750-800 entries for the campaign digitally this year as compared to 400 entries, which are almost 200 per cent of what we received last year. Our digital presence for the campaign has multiplied exponentially with more than 10 million impressions as compared to 4 million last year,” said Jose.
Faber Castell is willing to double its business in India this year, and such response for the campaign indicates that they might be able to achieve the goal. The brand is also working on a multi-pronged strategy to further develop their business, mixing effective marketing and communication with product development.
Jose revealed that, for the Indian market, a lot of innovation is going on in the acrylic and watercolour segments, developing a range of options for hobby artists.
The marketing activities, like always, are focussed on the experiential side. Activities like ‘Art With Purpose’ will continue to connect with students across schools and universities. Apart from that a lot of digital activities are expected from the brand, which now has a strong community of mothers and artists online.
Brands
Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
