MAM
Triple A Awards: Lowe maxes, Contract follows with Quadrant getting three golds
It’s awards season in the advertising business. The first of them: the seventh edition of The Triple A Awards (in association with leading Indian television network Star India) got going last night at Mumbai’s Oberoi Hotel.
A lounge suit affair held by the poolside, it attracted head honchos from advertising right from JWT head Mike Khanna to RK Swamy’s Sreenivasan Swamy to Saatchi & Saatchi’s R.Shantakumar, Lowe Lintas’s Prem Mehta, Bates India’s Madhukar Kamath, Mudra’s Kaushik Roy, Madison’s Sam Balsara, and Canco’s and 3Aof I president Ramesh Narayan, and London-based art and creative guru Graham Fink and his partner Dierdre Allen of the Fink Tank.
Also present was O&M’s Piyush Pandey, which led Balsara who hosted the proceedings to remark that “I hope Piyush’s presence lays to rest any controversy that the media is trying to play up about O&M and the 3A of I.”
Marketing veterans such as Hawkins’ Brahm Vasudeva, and the Tata Group’s J.C. Chopra, Eureka Forbes’s COO Bal Palekar, Levers’ director (personal products) Arun Adhikari, and director (detergents) Aart Weizburg, also marked their presence.
The evening commenced with a rendition of the Barbara Streisand hit single Memory by Sharon Prabhakar, which talked about the bad times that the advertising industry has gone through last year and how it is seeking a silver lining. An impeccable performance if there was any by India’s Evita.
Sam Balsara and Canco boss Ramesh Narayan were the sole two individuals on stage who handed out the awards. Fink – best known for his British Airways campaign which featured humans creating a face – came in as a break. He scolded the fraternity for not being buoyant about the awards and the wins. He mimicked the walk of the Lowe Lintas rep who walked up to receive the awards and told him to not look miserable. (This remark led Balki to comment later that he does not need any Finks or Pandeys or Khanna to teach Lowe how to walk or talk while receiving an award). Fink then went to talk about how he masqueraded as an old man in London to get a job in Collette, Dickens and Pierce, a creative hotshop in those days. He also extolled ad professionals to ask themselves what is their message, quoting Mahatma Gandhi who once said “My message is my Life.”
The big awards went to Levers (The Advertiser of the Year), Quadrant (Showcase of the Year – Press, Contract bagged the silver and HTA the bronze), Lowe Lintas (Showcase of the Year, joint silvers to Contract and HTA), Everest and Saatchi (joint gold for Campaign of the Year for Parle Agro’s Frooti Digen Verma campaign, and Maruti Udyog’s WagonR respectively; Levers’ Pepsodent toothpaste got the silver).
The awards were marked by the absence of any entries from O&M. The Abbys which are slated to be held on 9 March 2002, will be marked by the absence of any entries from Lowe Lintas. Apparently, a schism has been created in the industry last year, since Lowe Lintas’ Balki and O&M’s Piyush Pandey got into a media brawl about the manner in which the Abbys were being judged.
Digital
Content India 2026 opens with a copro pitch, a spice evangelist and a £10,000 prize for Indian storytelling
Dish TV and C21Media’s three-day summit puts seven ambitious projects before an international jury, and two walk away with serious development money
MUMBAI: India’s content industry gathered in Mumbai this March for Content India 2026, a three-day summit organised by Dish TV in partnership with C21Media, and it wasted no time making a statement. The event opened with a Copro Pitch that put seven scripted and unscripted television concepts before an international panel of judges, and by the end of it, two projects had walked away with £10,000 each in marketing prize money from C21Media to support development and international promotion.
The jury, comprising Frank Spotnitz, Fiona Campbell, Rashmi Bajpai, Bal Samra and Rachel Glaister, evaluated a shortlist that ranged from a dark Mumbai comedy-drama about mental health (Dirty Minds, created by Sundar Aaron) to a Delhi coming-of-age mystery (Djinn Patrol, by Neha Sharma and Kilian Irwin), a techno-thriller about a teenage gaming prodigy (Kanpur X Satori, by Suchita Bhatia), an investigative crime drama blending mythology and modern thriller (The Age of Kali, by Shivani Bhatija), a documentary on India’s spice heritage (The Masala Quest, hosted by Sarina Kamini), a documentary on competitive gaming (Respawn: India’s Esports Revolution, by George Mangala Thomas and Sangram Mawari), and a reality-horror competition merging gaming and immersive fear (Scary Goose, by Samar Iqbal).
The session was hosted by Mayank Shekhar.
The two winners were Djinn Patrol, backed by Miura Kite, formerly of Participant Media and known for Chinatown and Keep Sweet: Pray & Obey, with Jaya Entertainment, producers of Real Kashmir Football Club, also attached; and The Masala Quest, created and hosted by Sarina Kamini, an Indian-Australian cook, author and self-described “spice evangelist.”
The summit also unveiled the Content India Trends Report, whose findings made for bracing reading. Daoud Jackson, senior analyst at OMDIA, set the tone: “By 2030, online video in India will nearly double the revenue of traditional TV, becoming the main driver of growth.” He noted that in 2025, India produced a quarter of all YouTube videos globally, overtaking the United States, while Indians collectively spend 117 years daily on YouTube and 72 years on Instagram. Traditional subscription TV is declining as free TV and connected TV gain ground, forcing broadcasters to innovate. “AI-generated content is just 2 per cent of engagement,” Jackson added, “highlighting the dominance of high-quality human content. The key for Indian media companies is scaling while monetising effectively from day one.”
Hannah Walsh, principal analyst at Ampere Analysis, added hard numbers to the picture. India produced over 24,000 titles in January 2026 alone, with 19,000 available internationally. The country now accounts for 12 per cent of Asia-Pacific content spend, up from 8 per cent in 2021, outpacing both Japan and China. Key exporters include JioStar, Zee Entertainment, Sony India, Amazon and Netflix, delivering over 7,500 Indian-produced titles abroad each year. The top importing markets are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, the United States and the Philippines. Scripted content dominates globally at 88 per cent, with crime dramas and children’s and family titles performing particularly strongly.
Manoj Dobhal, chief executive and executive director of Dish TV India, framed the summit’s ambition squarely. “Stories don’t need translation. They need a platform, discovery, and reach, local or global,” he said. “India produces more movies than any country, our streaming platforms compete globally, and our tech and creators win international awards. Yet fragmentation slows growth. Producers, platforms, and tech move in different lanes. We need shared spaces, collaboration, and an ecosystem where ideas, technology, and people meet. That is why we built Content India.”
The data, the pitches and the prize money all pointed to the same conclusion: India is not waiting for the world to discover its stories. It is building the infrastructure to sell them.
