MAM
HT goes full Thalaivar as Rajinikanth headlines a century-old front page
MUMBAI: Some stars earn headlines, Rajinikanth becomes the headline. In a landmark media moment, Hindustan Times and OTTplay transformed the newspaper’s iconic front page into ‘Rajinikanth Times’, a full-blown tribute celebrating the superstar’s 50-year cinematic reign, created in partnership with Amazon Prime Video.
For the first time in HT’s 100-year history, the newspaper surrendered its entire front page to a single individual, a gesture reserved for a phenomenon who long ago crossed the border between actor and mythology. The masthead was reimagined, the visual language revamped, and the familiar seriousness of the broadsheet replaced with a bold salute to the man whose on-screen swagger has shaped pop culture for half a century.
The celebration didn’t stop at print. The HT Media network carried the homage across platforms, with Fever FM bringing the tribute alive on radio looping fans, listeners and lifelong Thalaivar devotees into a rare, multi-platform cultural crescendo that merged nostalgia with modern storytelling.
At the heart of the initiative is OTTplay, India’s leading OTT aggregation platform, which offers 30 plus OTT services in a single subscription powered by an AI-driven discovery engine. For millions of fans, it becomes the one-stop streaming gateway to Rajinikanth’s vast universe from evergreen classics like Baasha, Muthu and Thalapathi to contemporary blockbusters such as Kabali, Kaala, Petta, Jailer, Vettaiyan and Coolie.
Whether the titles sit on Sun NXT, Amazon Prime Video or JioHotstar, OTTplay curates every era of Rajinikanth in one place, a digital temple for the Thalaivar faithful.
“Every generation finds its own Rajinikanth, a hero, a philosopher, a symbol of courage,” said OTTplay CEO & co-founder Avinash Mudaliar. “Celebrating his 50 years in cinema with a front-page tribute is our way of honouring a legacy that shaped not just films, but the very way we dream. Through OTTplay, we hope to make every chapter of his journey accessible to fans old and new.”
This extraordinary front-page takeover blending print innovation, digital reach and radio amplification doubles as a reminder of how storytelling evolves, and how some icons remain timeless through every medium.
In the end, Hindustan Times didn’t just honour Rajinikanth. It bowed as an entire nation often does to a superstar who continues to redefine what stardom looks like, sounds like, and feels like.
MAM
Publicis Groupe India launches data-led influencer platform ‘Influential’
A new platform, a seasoned hire and an ambitious plan to bring discipline to India’s booming but chaotic creator economy.
MUMBAI: Influencer marketing in India is big, messy and, for most brands, maddeningly hard to measure. Publicis Groupe India has decided it has had enough of that and is moving to fix it.
The advertising giant has launched Influential, its global creator marketing solution, in India, pairing the rollout with the appointment of Diwaker Chandani as managing partner for Influential India. The brief is blunt: drag influencer marketing out of the spray-and-pray era and into one defined by data, accountability and results that actually show up on a balance sheet.
A fragmented market ripe for disruption
India’s influencer ecosystem has scale in abundance. What it lacks is maturity. Measurement standards are inconsistent, creator databases are riddled with duplication, and brands remain dangerously hooked on organic reach, a strategy that flatters vanity metrics while delivering uncertain commercial returns. Chandani, who brings nearly two decades of experience across digital platforms and media, puts it plainly. “The ecosystem has scale, but not maturity,” he says. “By combining data-led audience intelligence with creator ecosystems and media amplification, we aim to build a model that delivers measurable and repeatable outcomes.”
It is a diagnosis that Publicis Groupe is staking serious infrastructure on. Influential is anchored in the group’s Connected Identity system, which maps consumer profiles to enable more precise audience targeting and creator selection. Layered on top are the Captiv8 platform and Influential’s global creator network, giving brands the tools to plan, activate and measure campaigns across the full funnel, from awareness down to commerce, rather than treating each influencer post as a standalone act of faith.
The hire
Chandani is not an unfamiliar face in the industry. He has held senior roles at Meta, Zee Entertainment and the Network18 Group, working across creator partnerships and content-led media strategies. His mandate at Influential India is to integrate data, creators, media and commerce into a unified framework and to build the team and client roster to scale it.
Anupriya Acharya, chief executive of Publicis Groupe South Asia, frames the launch as a response to a market that has grown faster than its own infrastructure. “The channel has reached scale, but lacks a unified, data-led foundation,” she says. “With Influential, we are moving from a creator-first approach to a cohort-first, identity-led model powered by Connected Identity.” The integration of creators, media and commerce, she adds, will enable more precise and scalable outcomes for brands.
Why now
The timing is deliberate. Influencer marketing in India is expanding rapidly, fuelled by cheap data, a vast and young social-media audience, and brands increasingly willing to redirect budgets away from traditional media. But growth without governance has created a market where consistent returns remain elusive and accountability is largely aspirational. Publicis Groupe is betting that the industry’s next phase belongs not to whoever has the biggest roster of creators, but to whoever can prove, with hard numbers, that those creators are actually shifting product.
The old model of picking a popular face, posting a reel and hoping for the best is running out of road. Influential is Publicis Groupe India’s wager that the future belongs to the spreadsheet as much as the selfie.
