Brands
Puma taps Nadia Kokni to turbocharge global brand play
HERZOGENAURACH: Puma has appointed Nadia Kokni as vice-president of global brand marketing, drafting in a heavyweight brand builder as it doubles down on sharper storytelling and product-led growth.
Kokni, who takes charge from January 1, replaces Richard Teyssier, who has left the company to pursue other opportunities. She joins Puma’s global leadership team and reports to Maria Valdes, chief brand officer.
In her new role, Kokni will steer Puma’s global brand marketing engine, spanning strategy, creative direction, integrated marketing and communications worldwide. The brief is clear: dial up brand heat, sharpen narratives around Puma’s product icons and sync innovation more tightly with storytelling.
Kokni arrives with a formidable CV across sport, fashion and lifestyle. She has held senior posts at JD Sports, H&M, Adidas and Tommy Hilfiger, and most recently led global marketing and communications at Hugo boss, where she drove a sweeping brand reset and digital acceleration.
Valdes called her “a world-class marketing leader” whose mix of strategic rigour, creative edge and cultural fluency fits Puma’s next phase. The hire follows Puma’s recent consolidation of brand marketing, product, creative direction, innovation and go-to-market into a single global unit under Valdes.
Brands
IICT partners with Gativedhi to bring studio production tools to students
New MoU lets students explore AI-driven production pipelines for AVGC-XR
MUMBAI: The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) has teamed up with Gativedhi Technologies to give students a front-row seat to modern studio production. The collaboration will integrate Gativedhi’s AI-powered production intelligence platform, Shotrack, into academic programmes, letting students experience the workflow systems used by animation, VFX and gaming studios.
Under the MoU, faculty, students and researchers will get hands-on access to Shotrack through beta programmes, pilot deployments and academic evaluations. This will allow them to explore simulated production pipelines, understand asset management, track tasks and monitor schedules, essentially seeing how complex projects come together behind the scenes.
Shotrack is designed to tackle a key industry challenge: when multiple studios work on the same project, differing internal systems often create bottlenecks, slow approvals and complicate version control. The platform provides a unified production environment, enabling smoother collaboration across distributed teams while generating operational insights and predictive analytics to optimise crew allocation, forecast schedule risks and manage costs.
The collaboration also opens doors to Gativedhi’s wider ecosystem. Upcoming tools include StudioTrack, for studio operations management covering budgeting, recruitment and IT infrastructure, and WorkTrack, which measures workflow efficiency and team productivity across industries.
IICT plans to embed these tools into programmes covering animation pipelines, VFX workflows, gaming production and media project management. Students will also benefit from guest lectures, masterclasses, workshops, internships and research projects that connect academic learning with real-world studio practices.
IICT CEO Vishwas Deoskar, said the partnership provides “An environment where production pipeline tools can be explored, tested and refined while students gain insight into how large-scale productions are organised.”
Gativedhi Technologies founder & CEO Senthil Kumar added, “This collaboration introduces students to real-world studio management tools and helps us improve our platform with academic feedback.”
With Shotrack in classrooms, India’s future animators, VFX artists and gaming producers will get a taste of studio life long before they step into one.
