Marketing Director

Akshay Surve promoted to senior marketing associate at JioStar sports. From Sony Sports to Wimbledon, the ad-industry-trained sports storyteller has now spent nearly a decade building campaigns for the biggest names in the game 5 hours ago September 7, 2026 MUMBAI: Sports marketing in India has a habit of rewarding people who genuinely love the game as much as the craft, and Akshay Surve fits that mould squarely. He has moved into a new role as senior marketing associate, marketing excellence, in JioStar's sports vertical, promoted from within after just eight months at the company. Given the breadth of live sporting properties he has already handled there, from the ICC T20 World Cup to Wimbledon, the elevation looks less like a lucky break and more like an obvious next step. Surve joined JioStar in February this year on social media marketing, where his brief covered day-to-day publishing and real-time content execution across some of the biggest properties on the calendar, including the ICC T20 World Cup 2026, Tata IPL 2026, the Women's T20 World Cup, India's tour of England and Wimbledon 2026. Beyond routine posting, he ran moment marketing initiatives, spotting key match moments and shaping stats-led and static creatives to drive engagement in real time, precisely the kind of fast-turnaround content work that separates good sports social teams from great ones. What makes his profile stand out is the sheer range of sports and agency experience feeding into it. Before JioStar, Surve spent time at Sportwalk as key account manager, running content calendars and on-ground coverage for clients including Kalinga Lancers, Legends Pro T20 and Global Sports Pickleball, and interned at Impetus Sports on partnerships and sponsorship strategy, scouting brand fit across marathons and cricket leagues. He also did a stint at CricViz as a broadcast data analyst during the IPL and T20 World Cup 2024, giving him a data-literate edge that pure content marketers often lack. His earlier career adds an advertising pedigree to the sports specialism. Surve worked as brand service manager at MullenLowe Lintas Group on accounts including Eureka Forbes and Runwal, and before that as brand associate at L&K Saatchi & Saatchi managing celebrity shoots and festive campaigns. Further back still, at Scarecrow Communications, he handled Sony Sports properties spanning the Olympics, Euro 2020, the Ashes and the Australian Open, and was part of the team that launched the Prime Volleyball League, India's first ever volleyball competition. That is a genuinely rare combination, mainline advertising discipline married to hands-on sports broadcast marketing, built over five-plus years and a postgraduate qualification in sports management. JioStar promoting him into a marketing excellence role after less than a year says something about how quickly that combination has proven its worth. Sports marketing at the scale JioStar operates, running content across the country's most-watched cricket and global properties simultaneously, needs people who understand both brand strategy and the split-second instincts live sport demands. On the evidence of his run so far, Surve looks well placed to keep delivering exactly that.

JioStar appoints geetanjali Jain as director-sports Marketing Team. Geetanjali Jain brings experience across marketing and management, with a career spanning P&G, Nykaa Fashion and Google. Geetanjali Jain joins JioStar as Director in Sports Marketing Team. She shared the update via a LinkedIn post. Prior to this, Jain was associated with P&G as Senior Brand Manager from December 2022 to March 2025. Earlier, she worked with Nykaa Fashion as Marketing Manager from March 2020 to December 2022 and with Curefit as Growth Manager from May 2019 to January 2020. Previously, Jain worked with Google as Support Expert, Consumer Operations from August 2015 to July 2016 and later got promoted to Programmatic Account Strategist / Campaign Manager from July 2016 to February 2018. Earlier, she worked with Zomato as Quality Analyst from June 2015 to August 2015.

Indian streaming giant JioHotstar is betting big on Canada's South Asian diaspora. India's largest video streaming service, Jiostar, launched in Canada, promising to bring on a wider audience from the South Asian diaspora through enhanced interactive features. Jiostar's new subscriptions replace Hotstar that has served Canadian audiences since 2017. As of Sept. 2, Hotstar disappeared from Canada, the UK and Singapore and all three markets converted to the JioHotstar app and brand simultaneously. Existing subscribers were migrated automatically. What's new isn't the platform's presence here - it's what Canadian viewers can now do with it. Industry experts say JioStar's rebrand gives some Canadian viewers a more "formalized" way of accessing the platform, moving away from the informal downloads many relied on. The U.S. was not included in the launch. Hotstar once ran a standalone U.S. service, but in 2021, it was folded into Hulu and ESPN+. JioStar was created in November 2024 when Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries merged its media assets with Disney's India business in an $8.5-billion deal. Canadian subscribers now get Hindi television shows such as Anupama and Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai seven days ahead of their broadcast in India. They can also vote live on the Bigg Boss reality franchise across all six language editions, with a 24/7 live feed - access even the UK doesn't get. Pricing has changed too: Monthly plans are gone in Canada, replaced by quarterly ($19.99) and annual ($49.99) options. The UK service is allowing existing monthly subscribers to keep their plans until the auto-renewal lapses. The platform is owned by JioStar, the joint venture between Viacom18 and Disney India. Viacom18 is controlled by Reliance Industries, the conglomerate led by Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man. In a press release announcing the changes, Amit Malhotra, JioStar's Head of International Business, said the company wants to "reimagine how audiences experience entertainment," positioning the rebrand as more than cosmetic. It's a shift toward personalization, real-time engagement and a deeper content library, now topping 160,000 hours across 12 languages, according to the press release. The most recent Hindi season of Bigg Boss drew 133 million viewers, according to figures released by JioStar. Digital reach increased 30 per cent compared to the previous season and the grand finale peaked at 4.5 million concurrent viewers on the platform. JioHotstar is chasing a big audience in Canada too. According to the 2021 census, 2.57 million people in Canada identified as South Asian, making them the country's largest visible minority group. Of those, 1.35 million identified specifically as being of Indian origin. A bigger pipe, not a new one Faiza Hirji, a professor at McMaster University who has studied Bollywood's relationship with diaspora audiences for years, is skeptical that the platform has changed. "South Asians living in diaspora will find a way to access this kind of content because it is so important to them," Hirji said, pointing to the decades-old, often informal ways Canadian audiences have gotten their Bollywood fix - passing around videotapes, satellite dishes and unofficial set-top boxes. In Hirji's view, JioHotstar has made access to its content more formal and easier, rather than increasing the number of subscribers. According to Hirji, the channel's attraction isn't really about India at all. It's about recognition: Seeing people who look like them; hearing a familiar language; or catching a glimpse of rituals and music without ever having lived in the country. She traced back the industry's courtship of diaspora audiences roughly three decades, to films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, a story centred on Indian diaspora life in the UK and the longest-running film in Indian cinema history. The film is still screened daily at a Mumbai theatre 30 years after its release, which Hirji said marked a turning point where Bollywood could no longer ignore the affluent, growing audience living abroad. Interactive features such as live voting are simply the next step in that long trajectory, rather than a break from it, she said. Voting as a hook Toronto arts and culture reporter Aparita Bhandari, who co-hosts the Bollywood podcast, Khabardaar, sees the live-voting feature as a deliberate strategy rather than a gimmick. She said interactive participation is a way to expand the platform's audience base, drawing in viewers who might otherwise treat Bollywood content as background noise rather than appointment viewing. By Shilpashree Jagannathan, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter Original Published on Sep 02, 2026 at 22:14 This item reprinted with permission from New Canadian Media Ottawa, Ontario