MUMBAI: Rohit Reddy may be lounging in his monochrome threads and bucket hat like it’s a lazy Sunday, but don’t let the chill vibe fool you, this man’s schedule is more packed than a Mumbai traffic jam. From his third-floor creative bunker in the chaos capital of Mumbai, he is juggling deadlines like flaming batons. Between AI wizardry and influencer fire drills, Reddy barely has time to blink at the traffic blazing past his floor-to-ceiling windows, let alone sip his coffee while it’s still hot.
As one is ushered into his conference room, he flashes a grin and shoots straight from the hip, “Sorry to keep you waiting! Got caught in an important business call.”
No fluff, no filter, just the kind of honest hustle you’d expect from a man who is steering the ship as advertising agency EiPi Media’s founder & CEO. Keeping pace with him are creative brain Tapoja Roy who scripts the stories, and Nikhil Chhabria, the agency’s go-to GenAI expert.
EiPi Media isn’t just making noise, it is orchestrating a full-blown content symphony. Whether it’s slick influencer videos, jaw-dropping CGI, or its latest AI-fueled experiments, this crew’s rewriting the rules of brand storytelling—one pixel at a time.
Forget your preconceived notions of a typical production house. EiPi Media didn’t exactly start with cameras and a clapperboard. Instead, it kicked off as a social media marketing agency, leveraging Rohit’s wife, co-founder and actress Anita Hassanandani’s television connections to exclusively manage TV artists in 2018.
“There was nobody managing TV stars at scale at that time,” recalls Rohit, who spent a good dozen years in finance and insurance before turning entrepreneur. “So we began the agency, but we didn’t want to onboard any talent as such. We were doing this whole brokering deal.”
Initially, its client roster was a cosy club of four or five friends in marketing, including big names like Domino’s and Neo to whom they supplied artistes for a fee. But the pandemic, a rude awakening for many, proved to be EiPi Media’s unlikely launchpad.
“In 2020, when the pandemic happened, all these clients of ours, they cancelled the POs,” the founder explains. “That time I realised that I cannot be dependent on just a few clients.”
This realisation sparked an aggressive sales drive, leading to inroads with giants like Nestle and P&G. As brands shifted television budgets to digital, EiPi Media found itself in the sweet spot, growing a whopping 8x in 2020. The team quickly evolved from merely supplying talent to offering creative ideation and eventually a full-blown production. “Brands had a lot of comfort because they had to only talk to one person,” he notes, highlighting the firm’s end-to-end, in-house model as a key differentiator.
EiPi Media’s ascent wasn’t just about diversification; it was about embracing cutting-edge tech. 2020 marked its deep dive into visual effects, earning the agency a reputation as a “marketing tech company.”
It was creating “frugal productions” at a time when big production houses wouldn’t touch small budgets.
Then came 2021, and with it, a massive leap into CGI. EiPi Media got busy crafting dinosaurs and animations for internal projects. “I was very sure that I needed to take this CGI initiative to brands,” Reddy asserts.
Its big break came with Adidas, which had just signed the Indian cricket team. EiPi Media delivered a CGI video for the jersey launch. Since then, it has churned out over 60 large and hundreds of smaller CGI campaigns.
“For us, CGI was always an extension of VFX,” he clarifies, “it was always improving the content.” This foresight gave EiPi a two-year head start on the competition.
Just as others were jumping on the CGI bandwagon, EiPi Media was already pivoting to AI. Its first AI video dropped in October 2023, well before brands even grasped its potential.
“We kind of saw the vision that AI would actually be a very, very strong pillar to production,” he states.
The real game-changer with AI, he believes, is its ability to “actually replace production.” While pre-production (concept, script, storyboard, casting) and post-production (editing, music, colour grading) remain manual, the entire production phase is now happening on computers. “There is no casting. There is no hair makeup. There is no costume. There is no actor. There is no director,” he enthuses. This significantly slashes costs and turnaround times, a true relief for clients.
Hdfc Bank and Fenesta Windows were among its first clients to embrace generative AI commercials, alongside international brands like South African noodle company Indomie and Lenovo.
What excites Reddy the most about generative AI?
“There’s no limit to creativity now,” he shrugs. “Ideas that were once too expensive or physically impossible to execute in traditional or even CGI production are now within reach. Imagine a conversation on Mars, with participants levitating, becomes possible at a fraction of a cost and a fraction of a time.”
While some might argue AI stifles creativity, he believes the current limitations lie with the nascent technology, not human ingenuity. Its viral “Mahabharata 1.0″ video, made in just six hours as an in-house project, proved the concept. The recently released “Mahabharata 2800,” an upgraded version, showcases the rapid advancements in tools.
The decision to create a generative AI film based on the Mahabharata was driven by its boundless storytelling potential. “It has so many layers, so many characters,” he explains. The epic’s fantastical elements also play well with current AI capabilities. Though its first Mahabharata trailer went viral, sparking calls from major publications, he cautions that making a full-length film with generative AI is “not at all easy” yet, as the tools aren’t quite there for complex storytelling. Disconnected content, like trailers, is where AI shines for now.
The demand for generative AI content is skyrocketing, but supply is scarce., points out Reddy
“We are the only people supplying good content,” he claims, attributing the agency’s advantage to its extensive experience in traditional filmmaking. “We understand storytelling. We understand scripting. We have everything in-house.”
This blend of creative and tech expertise positions EiPi perfectly to ride the AI wave.
Reddy predicts a hybrid future for TV commercials, where elements like exterior shots or traffic scenes might be generated by AI, while core scenes will be traditionally filmed. Smaller budget ad films (those around Rs 10-15 lakhs) are ripe for a full AI shift, potentially reducing costs to Rs 3-4 lakhs.
EiPi Media’s traditional filmmaking team boasts around 30 people, while its burgeoning AI team, currently eight strong, is focused on learning and experimenting. Hiring is less about age and more about interest and strong English skills for effective prompting. He laments the lack of impressive AI-generated visuals in India, partly due to the unavailability of tools like Google’s Veo 3. Fortunately, EiPi Media’s Ohio office gives the outfit early access to such innovations.
Its creative team, a lean but experienced trio, has penned over 3,000 scripts. For CGI, it outsources to Iran and Russia when the need arises, favouring the artists’ attention to detail and quality over Indian talent, who are more often than not tied up with Hollywood projects.
On the gen AI front, the team leverages a suite of tools, including Midjourney (now generating videos), Halo, Google Veo 3 (praised for its lip-sync function), and Runway.
He believes the playing field for generative AI is level globally. “The only people having an advantage are people who are investing more time than the others.”
While he foresees AI complementing and eventually replacing traditional filmmaking in genres like mythology and fantasy, he believes it will take about five years for the technology to fully mature for comprehensive storytelling.
EiPi Media’s focus will remain firmly on branded content, leveraging video as the primary communication medium. Its future plans involve significant investment in an R&D department dedicated to “just experimenting tools, going crazy, basically.” He anticipates that within the next two years, directors and producers will increasingly outsource specific scenes and elements to AI, particularly those that are not cost-effective or time-consuming to shoot traditionally.
It does not take too much intelligence to guess who will end up getting the fruits of this transition.
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Mistry began his career with AF Ferguson & Co before joining HDFC in 1981, where he rose through the ranks to become vice-chairman & CEO from 2010 to 2023. Under his leadership, HDFC transformed into India’s largest financial services conglomerate, founding key entities such as HDFC Bank., HDFC Asset Management Co, HDFC Life Insurance Co, and HDFC ERGO General Insurance Co.
