English Entertainment
O&M sweeps Abby 2000
The Advertising Club Bombay unleashed on 31 March, the Abby 2000 awards for excellence in creative advertising which attracted 4,109 entries. Oglivy & Mather (O&M) swept the awards ceremony with 48 points.
It walked away with 32 gold and silver Abbies, including the Campaign of the Century for its advertising work on spreading the chocolate eating habit amongst Indian adults for Cadbury. No other agency came even near the halfway mark of O&M’s tally but those that put up some sort of fight include Contract Advertising (14 points) and Mudra Communications (seven points).
O&M and Enterprise Nexus bagged Gold Abbies for Castrol Scootex 2T and The Times of India (One man’s burden) campaigns respectively in the ‘Consumer Products’ section of the Cinema/TV category. The Silver Abby in the same category was awarded to O&M and HTA for Pond’s Blackhead Removal Strips (Lady Bug) and Pepsi (Yeh Dil Mange More) campaigns respectively.
O&M bagged both the Gold and Silver Abbies in the Consumer Durables section of the Cinema/TV category. The gold Abby was awarded for the Kelvinator (teeth) campaign while the Silver Abby was awarded for the Kelvinator (Singer) campaign.
MTV India bagged the silver Abby for the MTV VJ Hunt Loser (Mama Yo…) campaign while Channel [V]’s website www.vindia.com won the best website award.
English Entertainment
Ellison takes his Paramount-Warner Bros case straight to theater owners
The Skydance chief goes to CinemaCon with promises and a skeptical crowd waiting
CALIFORNIA: David Ellison strode into a room packed with thousands of cinema owners and executives at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday and did something rather bold: he looked them in the eye and asked them to trust him.
The chief executive of Paramount Skydance vowed that his company would release a minimum of 30 films a year if regulators greenlight its proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, a deal that has made theater owners deeply, and loudly, nervous.
“I wanted to look every single one of you in the eye and give you my word,” Ellison told the crowd. “Once we combine with Warner Bros, we are going to make a minimum of 30 films annually across both studios.”
It was a confident pitch. Whether it landed is another matter. Cinema operators have already called on regulators to block the deal, and scepticism in the room was hardly concealed.
Ellison pushed back by pointing to recent form. Paramount, born from the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media last August, plans to release 15 films this year, nearly double the eight it put out in 2025. Progress, he argued, was already underway.
He also threw theater owners a bone they have long been chasing: all films, he pledged, would run exclusively in cinemas for a minimum of 45 days, drawing applause from a crowd that has spent years fighting for exactly that commitment across the industry.
“People can speculate all they want,” Ellison said, “but I am standing here today telling you personally that you can count on our complete commitment. And we’ll show you we mean it.”
Fine words. The regulators, however, will have the last one.
