Brands
MullenLowe Media Mub comes to India as Lintas MediaHub
MUMBAI: MullenLowe Mediahub from MullenLowe Group has entered India and will operate as a division of MullenLowe Lintas Group’s omnichannel agency, PointNine Lintas. Lintas Mediahub is being launched as a full-service media offering for a digitised world, and will offer media strategy, communications planning, media planning and buying across all touch-points, both on and offline. The agency will also include a performance marketing offering and a programmatic buying engine.
In India, Lintas Mediahub aims to offer a counterpoint to the current crop of monolithic, volume hungry, singularly data-obsessed media agency models. As a part of the omnichannel offering of PointNine Lintas, it is designed to bring creativity and media together.
PointNine Lintas CEO Vikas Mehta says, “The separation of creative and media in the past two decades has gradually sucked ideas out of the media business. Media innovations have been largely ‘standardised’ and whilst there are some breakthroughs, they are few and far between. With Lintas Mediahub, we want to bring ideas back to the heart of the media offering. The addition of media capabilities to our service stack brings PointNine Lintas another step closer to our omnichannel vision.”
Lintas Mediahub will be headed by Vidhu Sagar, who joins as national director for media and will be based in Mumbai. Sagar joins from WPP where he was the business lead at Global Team Blue (GTB) – WPP’s integrated agency for Ford Motors. Prior to that he was an EVP at Carat Media India, served as general manager, FCB‐Ulka Delhi and was also head of marketing at India Today Group, amongst other roles.
Sagar comes with rich experience across the diverse disciplines of media planning, brand strategy and account management. Throughout his career he has acted as a brand champion for groundbreaking communication solutions for a variety of clients, including international brands such as BMW, General Motors, Ford, British Airways, Bausch & Lomb, Tropicana, MasterCard, Reebok, and Bose, as well as prominent Indian players such as ITC, Dabur, Hero, HCL, NIIT and Muthoot Group.
Lintas Mediahub national director for media Vidhu Sagar notes, “I am extremely excited to join Lintas Mediahub. It’s a magical combination really. PointNine Lintas, with its omnichannel thrust and an unmatched service stack, is uniquely positioned to address the growing need for a comprehensive surround approach to communication planning. And MullenLowe Mediahub, a robust yet edgily creative, media agency group, remains unparalleled across the globe in its appeal. Lintas Mediahub will be the perfect amalgam of science and art, seamlessly fusing logic with lateral thinking. We hope to challenge the status quo by adding a layer of imaginative thinking that’s missing from the offering of most media agencies today.
Lintas Mediahub will offer its services to clients across agencies of MullenLowe Lintas Group in India – Lowe Lintas, Mullen Lintas and PointNine Lintas. The launch in India, marks the expansion of the MullenLowe Mediahub network into 14 cities around the world, including Los Angeles, New York, London, Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo and Shanghai. Recently MullenLowe Mediahub was named MediaPost’s Creative Media Agency of the Year for the second consecutive year, and has an enviable client list that includes Chipotle, Eurosport, JetBlue, Harley-Davidson, Netflix, Royal Caribbean, Staples, and Western Union.
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.
