MAM
McCann strengthens management and creative teams
MUMBAI: Continuing its string of senior level appointments, IPG‘s McCann has appointed Ranjeev Vij as general manager McCann Delhi and Abhishek Das creative director – digital at McCann Mumbai. Recently, the agency brought on board ex CEO of Iris Alok Lall as executive director.
Vij has over 18 years of experience in the field. He started his career in 1994 as account supervisor at Enterprise Nexus. After six years at the agency, he moved to Draft FCB Ulka and later shifted to O&M as account group manager. His next move was to join Lowe Lintas as brand director before returning to Enterprise Nexus as account director for a while. After his second stint at Enterprise Nexus, he joined Redifusion DY&R as general manager on Bharti Airtel. After this, he joined Vyas Giannetti as VP and branch head and then moved to IRIS Worldwide as board director.
During his career, Vij has handled brands such as Airtel, General Motors, Aviva Life Insurance, DHL, J&J, P&G, Pepsico, VISA, HP, Sony and Sony Erickson.
Das has been in the industry for the past 10 years now having started his career with Ab&m Communications in New Delhi as senior copy writer in the year 2002. After working for two years, he moved to Oxygen and then to Tribal DDB before joining McCann New Delhi as creative supervisor.
Das has worked with brands such as TimesJobs, SimplyMarry, magicBricks, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Volvo, Nescafe, Kitkat, ESPN Star, MTV and UNESCO during his career so far.
Das said, “This would be my second stint at the McCann Worldgroup. It‘s been over five years since the last time I was at McCann Delhi and things have changed a lot. Prasoon and I have been in talks about building a strong digital presence for McCann for a while now, and given his vision of things to come, the challenge was very hard to resist. I look forward to adding a host of digital creative solutions to McCann‘s extensive portfolio.”
McCann Worldgroup chief executive officer Prasoon Joshi said, “Abhishek and Ranjeev are a great combination of new age media thinking with a sound background in the traditional. They both have more than a key role to play to further accelerate McCann‘s drive into the futuristic model and cutting edge offering.”
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.
