MAM
Rediffusion – Y&R creates ‘PlayDo’ to deliver ‘brand conversations’
MUMBAI: Rediffusion – Y&R has launched the toolkit PlayDo that aims to deliver ‘brand conversations‘ in a bid to recognise that the brand is not just what resides in the consumers head but is actually co-created with them.
Conceived by Group CSO Arvind Mohan and TME president Divya Radhakrishnan, the toolkit removes any preconceived notion of choice of medium and focuses on a thorough understanding of the business case, arriving at an agenda for the brand and then delivering it through the ‘conversation idea‘ and ‘conversation neighbourhood‘.
Says Arvind Mohan, “The role of branding and communication needs to be re-imagined today. Our world view is built out of a broadcast model, where the marketer is in charge and the primary mode of communication is one way – from one to many. In the many to many two-way world, the consumer talks back and what consumers are interested in talking about is far more important that what brands want to talk about. The question no longer is ‘did I deliver the message to the right address‘ but ‘what conversation did that message start‘.”
Adds Radhakrishnan, “The key challenge is to identify the right neighbourhood, that is, the appropriate environment where it is best for the consumer to have a conversation with the brand.”
Rediffusion – Y&R has also collated its group offerings as 1Rediffusion. 1Rediffusion is the umbrella term for their collective offering of brand solutions, ranging from creative, media, outdoor to direct, event and public relations. 1Rediffusion will function as a cohesive, collaborative unit using a combination of communication tools to address the brand‘s specific requirement.
Explains Group CEO Mahesh Chauhan, “Brand Conversations ensures that 1Rediffusion solutions face client business and directly impact the brand‘s value, values and valuation.”
Brands
Google secures AP discom licence to power $15bn Vizag AI hub
First-of-its-kind move gives tech giant grid control for massive 1GW campus
VISAKHAPATNAM: Google has secured a rare electricity distribution company licence in Andhra Pradesh, marking a decisive shift from being just a power consumer to becoming a power distributor for its upcoming mega data centre hub in Visakhapatnam.
The move effectively rewrites the rulebook for hyperscalers in India. Instead of relying on state utilities, Google will be able to procure electricity directly from generators, including its own renewable sources. This not only cuts out intermediaries but also gives the company tighter control over supply, reliability and long-term costs.
For a business where electricity can account for up to 60 per cent of operating expenses, the economics are hard to ignore. Even more critical is uptime. Data centres demand near-perfect reliability, and owning the distribution layer allows Google to manage outages and load balancing with far greater precision.
At the heart of the plan is a sprawling 1-gigawatt data centre ecosystem spread across more than 600 acres in three locations near Vizag. With an estimated investment of $15 billion over five years, the project is set to become India’s largest single foreign direct investment and Google’s biggest AI-focused facility outside the United States.
The campus is being designed with artificial intelligence workloads in mind, housing the company’s custom tensor processing units to power services such as Gemini, Search and Google Cloud. In scale, the planned capacity is comparable to powering a small city.
Google is not building alone. It has partnered with Adani Infrastructure to develop the physical campuses, while Bharti Airtel will set up an international subsea cable landing station. This connectivity backbone is expected to link the hub directly to a dozen countries, ensuring low latency for global data traffic.
Vizag’s coastal location plays a key role in that strategy. It enables direct access to subsea cables and provides the large volumes of water needed for cooling data centre operations. Equally important is policy backing from the Government of Andhra Pradesh, which fast-tracked approvals and granted the uncommon discom licence to anchor the investment.
Groundbreaking is scheduled for April 28, 2026, with phased commissioning expected to begin by July 2028.
The broader signal is clear. As AI workloads surge, hyperscalers are no longer content plugging into existing infrastructure. They are beginning to build and control it. In Vizag, Google is not just setting up a data centre, it is wiring up its own future.
