MAM
Grey Worldwide bags ONGC’s retail business
MUMBAI: Grey Worldwide has just bagged the creative duties of the ONGC retail business. ONGC, the oil major has decided to enter the retail space which will eventually see the launch of ONGC petrol pumps across the nation.
The inauguration of the first ONGC petrol pump outlet will take place in Mangalore on 19 March.
The role for Grey will essentially to communicate to the layman to come to the ONGC petrol station.
Agencies in the fray were McCann, O&M, Satchi & Satchi and Grey Worldwide. Grey was already handling ONGC’s corporate business earlier. The whole campaign will be an on-ground retail launch with a print campaign. The television campaign will break in six month’s time.
Speaking to Grey India COO Ashutosh Khanna on what set them apart, he says, “We had done our market research and secondly also understood the ONGC value and spirit better than the others. I think we finally managed to translate that better.”
In terms of how strategic the account is Khanna pointed out that with this win, they have renewed their partnership with ONGC and are very proud of it.
Details on the account size could not be arrived at as the oil major is still in the process of planning the whole campaign.
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.
