MAM
Skoda assigns creative mandate to Publicis India
MUMBAI: Popular automobile brand Skoda Auto India has extended its partnership with its creative Agency on Record (AoR) Publicis India by another three years.
The agency was awarded the extension after a hotly contested multi-agency pitch and will continue to manage the business out of its Mumbai office.
As part of its mandate, the agency will continue to provide mainline strategy and creative communication solutions to Skoda. It will handle all the sub-brands from Skoda including Rapid, Octavia, Superb, Kodiaq and soon launched Karoq.
Skoda Auto India head of marketing and product Tarun Jha says, “Skoda India is currently in a positive growth phase, and will be launching products across segments in the next few years. We were looking for a partner to help us achieve our goals and further strengthen Skoda’s equity in the Indian market. Publicis India showcased a thorough strategic and strong creative framework which was in alignment with the brand’s vision for the future. We are happy to be renewing our creative partnership with them and look forward to a great body of work in the coming years.”
Publicis Ambience COO Paritosh Srivastava mentions, “We expected nothing less given the body of work created by us in the last three years, which has also been recognised by the global Skoda team. It was a long and tough pitch and we are thankful that the team at Skoda has entrusted us for another three years. We are lucky to have been a part of an exciting transformation that Skoda India has undergone in the last three years from product design to experience to after-sales and are delighted that it has given the brand a boost in India.”
In Skoda Auto’s almost two-decade long presence in India, Publicis India has the longest association as its agency partner.
“There are always newer and bigger challenges in the tremendous growth journey we’re on and we are ready as trusted partners to help Skoda Auto India overcome them in the next few years,” adds Srivastava.
Over the past few years, Publics India has rolled out a series of campaigns for a range of brands under Skoda Auto. Be it the launch of the new Superb, new Rapid, new Octavia and even the Kodiaq, each communication material that has been released has resulted in significant returns for the auto-maker in India. Not to forget the extremely positive views and likes garnered from the customers across its social & digital channels.
The agency is currently working on a new brand campaign for Skoda Auto that would be unveiled very soon.
In India, the agency works with an impressive array of clients that include Nestle, Citibank, Zee, Garnier, Heineken, Nerolac, Skoda, Malaysia Tourism, HDFC Mutual Funds, etc.
MAM
WPP and Adobe deepen AI partnership for marketing
Expanded tie-up integrates Firefly into WPP Open for agentic workflows across creative and media.
MUMBAI: WPP and Adobe just teamed up to give marketing a brain transplant because when AI agents start calling the creative shots, even the toughest briefs might finally get solved. WPP and Adobe announced on 24 February 2026 a deepened global partnership aimed at untangling the chaos of modern marketing through a tightly integrated suite of AI tools. The collaboration fuses Adobe’s generative AI models, content platforms, and data orchestration capabilities with WPP’s strategic, creative, and media expertise, creating what the companies call a unified end-to-end marketing solution.
At the core is WPP Open, the agency group’s agentic marketing platform which will now embed Adobe Firefly Foundry. This allows brands to train generative AI models on their own cleared intellectual property, ensuring brand-safe content from the outset. Adobe agents will handle content creation and adaptation, while WPP agents optimise media spend and activate campaigns across channels.
The move addresses a mounting industry pain point: brands must churn out more content, across more platforms, for narrower audiences, all while keeping consistency intact. Fragmented tools and siloed workflows often slow production and dilute impact. The partnership promises to automate complex, multistep tasks planning, creation, production, and activation into a single AI-enabled flow, freeing human teams for higher-level creativity.
WPP chief technology officer Stephan Pretorius said, “For years, we’ve watched brilliant creative ideas get stuck in production queues… With Adobe, we’re shattering the barriers between ideation and impact, building agentic content systems that handle the complexity so human creativity can soar.”
Adobe president of customer experience orchestration business Anil Chakravarthy added, “Marketing and creative teams today understand the high bar consumers have set for personalisation… Bringing together capabilities across Adobe and WPP provides a seamless way for brands to address this challenge, activating AI agents to drive customer experience orchestration and unlock personalisation at scale.”
Both companies emphasised the continued centrality of human talent. They plan to train and deploy creative AI forward-deployed engineers in the coming years to help clients maximise AI-driven workflows and prepare marketers to collaborate with agentic systems.
For an industry drowning in content demands and tool sprawl, this alliance could be the life raft turning fragmented chaos into coordinated firepower, one AI agent at a time. Whether it truly unshackles creativity or just adds another layer of tech remains the real test, but the pitch is clear: let machines sweat the complexity, so humans can shine at what they do best.
