AD Agencies
Hitachi onboards BBH as creative partner
Mumbai: Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning India Ltd, India’s premium air-conditioner brand Hitachi, has appointed BBH India as its creative strategy and advertising agency partner. With this appointment, Hitachi aims to create a high decibel brand awareness and strengthen its brand leadership amongst the new informed world consumer.
The agency won the business as part of a contested multi-agency pitch and will manage full-service responsibilities for strategic creative design and advertising. As Hitachi’s agency of record, BBH India will now spearhead the development of both consumer-focused and business-driven marketing campaigns for Hitachi’s HVAC and refrigeration solutions.
Hitachi senior vice president – business planning & marketing Nilesh Shah said, “At Hitachi, our brand communication is always focused towards the changing needs and preferences of the new-age consumers who aspire for innovative product offerings. We wanted a strategic creative partner who can help us in strengthening our brand positioning as an Aspirational Premium brand by bringing in a fresh perspective to our brand proposition. We look forward to this creative partnership with BBH and further building on our track record of memorable, creative campaigns across the target audience.”
Commenting on the win, Leo Burnett – South Asia CEO & BBH India chairman Dheeraj Sinha said, “Air conditioning has become a crucial part of modern life, and, Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning India Limited is an undisputed leader in creating world-class air conditioning products. As a team, we are very proud and humbled to be chosen as a creative partner of India’s most aspirational and premium air conditioning brand. We have a big task in front of us, as the brand is known for its stunning consumer campaigns and has consistently rolled out great pieces of creative work over the years. We are excited to co-create the next chapter of the brand story and level up the brand salience.”
With over 35 years of legacy in India, Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning India Limited manufactures a wide range of products under the Hitachi brand, such as room air-conditioners (split & window ACs) to commercial air-conditioners including chiller, cassette air conditioners, ductable air-conditioners & VRF systems. A part of Publicis Groupe, BBH is a full-service global creative agency network offering strategic brand ideas, integrated communications, pure-play digital solutions, and much more to some of the world’s best-loved brands.
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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.
