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THE GROUP M BUYING PHILOSOPHY
Group M Central Trading Group National Director Lakshmi Narasimhan is the most powerful buyer in the Indian media space. Known as a tough negotiator, Narasimhan reveals his buying philosophies which the Group M agencies utilise as a common pool.
CTG’s entire buying department is divided into five clusters; every cluster working across regions specializing on a particular segment. Every buyer also has an added client servicing responsibility. “Every team handles large volumes but smaller set of suppliers. If a buyer is not rooted with the client, he will not able to customize the buys. This system helps leverage volume and fine tune into a client’s needs. The CTG follows a matrix structure where every buyer is responsible to a client for all buying issues, but accountable for a certain set of channels.”
Mindshare leverages volume in two areas:
1) Market knowledge derived due to the volume of clients handled by all the Group M agencies. “Hence we have a good sense of the market and an operating sense.”
2) Bulk buys which yield a better rate from media owners.
The five buying clusters of the CTG are as follows:
- Print & radio
- Unicontent (Niche channels)
- Regional channels
- Sports & DD
- Hindi Satellite
CTG’s Philosophy: “Our buying is analysis based and is not done by plain arm twisting. We follow stringent implementation processes via our MIS systems and most importantly we test the bottom of the market . We never tell a client that we have got deals below the market price. Our rates are benchmarked on real rates by striking the right price-value integration.
“In group M, buying is not a back line but a front line function.”
Profile of people: ” We prefer to hire people with a well rounded background. Most people have been planners in the past and are buyers now or have extensive experience with media companies. We take on people with an average experience of 6.5-7 years.
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AI could unlock billions for India’s $30 billion media industry, says JioStar vice-chairman Uday Shankar
JioStar vice-chairman urges industry to seize once-in-a-generation AI moment to turn India into the world’s creative capital
DELHI: India’s media industry stands at a historic inflection point. Artificial intelligence, long discussed as a technological disruptor, could now become the lever that propels the country from a domestic content giant to a global creative powerhouse.
Delivering the keynote at the IndiaAI Impact Summit, Uday Shankar argued that AI offers India a once-in-a-generation opportunity to lead, not follow, in global media and entertainment.
Shankar credited the prime minister’s vision for centring India’s growth agenda around AI and described the summit as overdue . Drawing on three decades in media, he traced the industry’s transformation from the arrival of the first newsroom computers to the launch of India’s earliest digital platforms, each wave of technology reshaping speed, scale and audience engagement.
The numbers tell a story of staggering growth. In just 25 years, India’s media and entertainment sector has expanded from a few billion dollars to become the world’s fifth-largest market, contributing more than $30bn to the economy. Television households have jumped from about 70m to over 210m, with more than 800m video consumers today.
Yet global influence remains elusive. While South Korea exported Squid Game and Parasite to worldwide acclaim, and Puerto Rico produced the most-streamed artist on the planet, India has struggled to consistently break through beyond its domestic and diaspora audiences .
The constraints are structural. Hollywood studio productions command budgets of $65m to $100m, with tentpoles running as high as $300m. The average Indian film operates on $3m to $5m . A marquee US television episode can cost $20m to $30m; an Indian serial is typically produced for Rs 7 lakh to Rs 10 lakh per episode, roughly $10,000. The capital gap, Shankar argued, has narrowed ambition and limited global competitiveness.
AI, he said, changes the equation by rewiring the three pillars of the industry: content, consumer and commerce.
On content, AI-powered production is collapsing infrastructure costs and accelerating timelines. At JioStar, the company recently produced Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh, a 100-episode live-action series delivered three to five times faster than a traditional production pipeline. The implication is stark. The remaining constraint is no longer capital, but imagination.
On consumers, AI enables conversational discovery, interactive storytelling and regionalisation that goes beyond simple dubbing to reflect India’s linguistic texture. On commerce, it unlocks granular segmentation and dynamic pricing, moving beyond the blunt instruments of subscription and advertising that have defined the industry for a century.
The prize is vast. The global media market, currently worth nearly $3trn, is projected to reach $3.5trn by 2029. India’s share remains under 2 per cent. Even a shift to 5 per cent would generate tens of billions of dollars in additional value.
But Shankar cautioned that opportunity does not guarantee outcome. He called for three commitments: self-disruption before external disruption, aggressive skilling to create AI-native creative hybrids, and policy frameworks that accelerate rather than constrain innovation.
Hollywood’s defensive posture towards AI, he suggested, offers India a rare window to design the business models and regulatory frameworks that could set global precedents. The shift in advantage, he argued, favours nations with deep cultural reservoirs and massive audiences.
The question is no longer whether India can lead in the AI age of media, he concluded, but whether it will move fast enough to claim that position.
The stories were always here. Now the technology has caught up.
