iWorld
Asian Paints’ collaborates with Disney+ Hotstar’s ‘Home Dancer’ show
KOLKATA: Paint category leader Asian Paints has joined hands with premium online streaming platform Disney+ Hotstar’s dance reality show Home Dancer for a consumer engagement innovation. Through Home Dancer, an online dance competition, Disney+ Hotstar offered dance lovers a unique chance to showcase their moves from the comfort of their homes where each week, participants chose a track on the app and uploaded a video on the microsite. This way, they continued to pursue their passion for dance notwithstanding the lockdown in India.
Asian Paints recently introduced its ‘Safe Painting’ services that aims to provide consumers with a safe painting environment and hassle-free, faster and professional experience. Consumers can now make their cherished space – home – an even more wonderful space as they stay indoors, maintaining social distancing during the current pandemic.
Home Dancer is a unique show, where participants shot their dance videos in their favourite, most important corners of their homes. The show and the ‘Safe Painting’ solutions are never-seen-before innovations born as a necessity of the onset of social distancing. Asian Paints thus saw this as an opportunity to partner with the series via an impactful in-show integration.
Speaking about the campaign, Madison Media chief digital officer Vishal Chinchankar said, “Our strategy was to build awareness about the safety measures of Asian Paints’ new Safe Painting service. Impact properties played a vital in this launch and helped build strong association and create consideration amongst consumers Most of the networks are unable to air any fresh content due to the pandemic, with Disney+ Hotstar’s Home Dancer being one exception. The show and Safe Painting focus strongly on indoors, making the torrid times of social distancing bearable for consumers with uninterrupted service. We believe the synergies matched perfectly for an effective in-show integration that communicates to millions.”
Speaking about the integration, Star and Disney India Ad Sales head Nitin Bawankule said, “With Home Dancer, Disney+ Hotstar has democratised content for viewers in this unprecedented time of social distancing. Asian Paints has empowered consumers by letting them optimize time and get their homes repainted, aligning all social distancing and safety norms. The collaboration of these two brands for this innovation seemed absolutely natural and points to the evolution of marketing hereon.”
The integration played out in Home Dancer’s episode 8, themed around ‘weddings, shows the conversation between the host Karan Wahi and his mother wherein she suggests Karan to give Asian Paints’ ‘Safe Painting’ service a try. The latter part of the episode highlights the quick service from Asian Paints as Karan receives a call from an Asian Paints executive, explaining all the strict safety, hygiene and social distancing measures employed by painters within the ‘Safe Painting’ service. Getting excited about the new initiative, Karan asks the audience to try out the service and signs off informing them about the missed call number.
iWorld
Meta plans 8,000 layoffs in new AI-led restructuring wave
First phase from May 20 may cut 10 per cent workforce amid AI pivot.
MUMBAI: At Meta, the future may be artificial but the cuts are very real. The social media giant is reportedly preparing a fresh round of layoffs, with an initial wave expected to impact around 8,000 employees as it doubles down on its artificial intelligence ambitions. According to a Reuters report, the first phase of job cuts is slated to begin on May 20, targeting roughly 10 per cent of Meta’s global workforce. With nearly 79,000 employees on its rolls as of December 31, the move marks one of the company’s most significant workforce reductions in recent years.
And this may only be the beginning. Sources indicate that additional layoffs are being planned for the second half of the year, although the scale and timing remain fluid, likely to be shaped by how Meta’s AI capabilities evolve in the coming months. Earlier reports had suggested that total cuts in 2026 could reach 20 per cent or more of its workforce.
The restructuring comes as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg continues to steer the company towards an AI-first operating model, committing hundreds of billions of dollars to the transition. Internally, this shift is already visible: teams within Reality Labs have been reorganised, engineers have been moved into a newly formed Applied AI unit, and a Meta Small Business division has been created to align with broader structural changes.
The trend is hardly isolated. Across the tech sector, companies are trimming headcount while investing aggressively in automation. Amazon, for instance, has reportedly cut around 30,000 corporate roles nearly 10 per cent of its white-collar workforce citing efficiency gains driven by AI. Data from Layoffs.fyi shows over 73,000 tech employees have already lost jobs this year, compared with 153,000 in all of 2024.
For Meta, the move echoes its earlier “year of efficiency” in 2022–23, when about 21,000 roles were eliminated amid slowing growth and market pressures. This time, however, the backdrop is different. The company is financially stronger, generating over $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in profit last year, with shares up 3.68 per cent year-to-date though still below last summer’s peak.
That contrast underlines the shift underway. These layoffs are less about survival and more about reinvention. As Meta restructures itself around AI from autonomous coding agents to advanced machine learning systems, the question is no longer whether the company will change, but how many roles will be left unchanged when it does.
