$8.5bn Disney-Reliance Merger Approved by Indian Regulator; Omnicom Opens New Organisation; UK Gov Makes Gen AI Investment for Teachers

by Aimee Newell Tarín on 29th Aug 2024 in News

On today’s news digest: $8.5bn Disney-Reliance Merger Approved by Indian Regulator; Omnicom Opens New Organisation; UK Gov Makes Gen AI Investment for Teachers

Disney and Reliance have gained the approval of the Competition Commission of India (CCI), the country’s antitrust watchdog, for their intended merger which would see the unification of their Indian media assets. The deal, valued at USD$8.5bn (£6.43bn), had previously raised the CCI’s concerns over cricket broadcasting control. Both parties had been warned by the watchdog earlier this month that their merger would have a tight grip on most TV and streaming cricket rights in the country and could hurt advertisers. The alliance would create India’s largest entertainment player including 120 TV channels and two streaming services, with the goal of competing against Amazon, Sony and Netflix.

Zooming in on the ad ecosystem, Omnicom has announced the formation of Omnicom Advertising Group (OAG), a new global organisation which will align creative networks and leading agencies within the Advertising Collective. It will bring together creative networks BBDO, DDB and TBWA with agencies Goodby Silverstein & Partners, GSD&M, Merkley & Partners and Zimmerman, in order to better address clients’ needs for creative solutions. Each will capitalise on the OAG’s tech, tools and capabilities. The new organisation will be led by Troy Ruhanen as CEO; Deepthi Prakash will take on the role of COO.

In the UK, the Labour government has revealed plans to invest £4m in a generative AI project which aims to ease the workloads of teachers in the country. The initiative sets out to develop AI tools which will help teachers mark students’ work, create classroom materials and plan lessons more efficiently. Although many teachers already use AI tools, they are not tailored to specific teaching documents used in the UK. The initiative will pool government documents such as lesson plans and anonymised pupil assessments, which will be used by AI companies to train their tools to generate accurate, high-quality content such as tailored lesson plans and workbooks. The government is offering a further £1m to companies which bring forward the best ideas to put the data into practice. The hope is that the newly developed models will be able to reduce educators’ out-of-hours work, as well as allowing them to place more focus on direct interaction with their students.