SAMSUNG INDIA LAUNCHES MAJOR MEDIA REVIEW

Samsung India has initiated a multi-agency media pitch after more than a decade with IPG-owned Lodestar. The nearly ₹300-crore mandate spans media planning and buying across all product categories, including mobile phones, making it one of the largest media account reviews in India and signalling a major strategic shift for the brand.  

Samsung India has kicked off a high-stakes reshuffling of its advertising strategy, launching a multi-agency media pitch that industry watchers say could reshape the country’s media buying landscape for 2026. The move is particularly notable because it ends more than a decade of exclusive collaboration with IPG-owned Lodestar, which has long held the electronics giant’s media mandate in India and helped steer its campaigns through a period of intense category expansion and competitive escalation.

According to executives familiar with the development, the pitch covers media planning and buying across Samsung’s full portfolio — from televisions and digital appliances to the crucial mobile phones category, which drives some of the company’s highest visibility and marketing expenditure in the Indian market. The assignment is estimated to be worth nearly ₹300 crore annually, placing it among the largest media account reviews currently underway in India and adding pressure on participants to demonstrate cross-channel agility, digital-first innovation and integrated brand performance capabilities.

The timing of the pitch reflects both market and organisational transitions. While Samsung continues to defend its leadership in premium smartphones and large-format TVs, it is also confronting a marketplace where consumer behaviour, media consumption and measurement frameworks have dramatically evolved from when its last major review was conducted. Streaming platforms now command significant share of high-value audiences, short-form video ecosystems have become critical engagement battlegrounds, and retail media networks have begun influencing both discovery and conversion at scale. For a category as competitive as mobile devices — where launches are frequent and marketing cycles increasingly compressed — media efficiency and real-time optimisation have become strategic imperatives rather than operational conveniences.

For the advertising industry, the pitch has triggered intense competition. Several large holding companies and independent media specialists are expected to be in contention, viewing the mandate as both a marquee win and a pathway into deeper strategic relationships with a global brand that spends heavily on innovation-led categories. Beyond the headline value, the review offers agencies an opportunity to influence multi-touchpoint strategy at a moment when Samsung is sharpening its omnichannel ambitions in India, investing in both premium experiential retail and aggressively scaled e-commerce partners.

The review is also being watched for what it signals about Samsung’s broader brand posture in the country. The company has been steadily increasing its local manufacturing footprint and product localisation strategy, and a revamped media model could enable a more segmented, regionally relevant and performance-driven communication framework. Executives suggest that the eventual winning agency — or agencies, depending on how Samsung structures the outcome — will likely need to integrate brand-building with measurable demand generation to support its business objectives across price tiers and product cycles.

While Samsung has not publicly commented on the pitch or its timeline, insiders expect the process to be completed in the coming months, with transition phases to follow. If concluded as expected, the review will not only close one of the longest-running media relationships in the Indian consumer electronics sector but also set the tone for how global brands navigate rapidly evolving media ecosystems in India — where scale, fragmentation and digital acceleration increasingly converge to redefine the competitive playbook.