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Sahil Shetty joins Business Media Private Limited as CEO of Fortune and Open Media
Former Network18 CRO to steer Fortune, Hollywood Reporter India
MUMBAI: Business Media Private Limited has appointed Sahil Shetty as its chief executive officer, marking a generational shift at the top of the publishing house. He joins on 9 March 2026, following his departure from Network18 Studio, where he served as chief revenue officer for the business news cluster.
At Business Media Private Limited, Shetty will steer strategy, operations and growth across its portfolio, which includes the Indian editions of Fortune and The Hollywood Reporter. The mandate signals an aggressive push to sharpen commercial muscle across print and digital platforms.
During nearly seven years at Network18 Media & Investments Limited, Shetty rose through the digital ranks. He joined in 2019 as west and south head – digital, tasked with expanding advertiser partnerships and tightening revenue operations. He later became national head – digital revenue, then national head – digital revenue and strategy, before being elevated to CRO in 2024.
In that role, he oversaw monetisation, partnerships and commercial operations across television and digital properties in the group’s business news portfolio.
Before Network18, Shetty spent nearly five years at Bennett Coleman & Co Limited, the publisher of The Times Group titles, focusing on IP-led revenue initiatives across media brands.
Earlier still, he built international experience in operations and strategy with Barclays UK Retail & Business Bank, Vodafone UK and Accenture UK.
Shetty arrives at Business Media Private Limited as one of the younger chief executives in India’s media sector, armed with cross-platform revenue credentials spanning television, digital and publishing. His appointment underscores a broader industry shift: editorial brands chasing growth with sharper commercial playbooks.
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The Merit of Madness: How AI is Changing the Game in Advertising
By Ritz Malik, founder, Ritz Media World.
MUMBAI: When it comes to growth in a competitive landscape, a businessman always has to be a firm believer in Darwinism. You either need to bring a better product, or a better price, or both to the table to get customers and scale. Without this value proposition, you remain unnoticed, and staying unnoticed is not something that a brand wants to do.
You have to do all this and also make sure that you stay cashflow positive at the same time. Otherwise, you’re at a real risk of becoming a large hollow balloon that your competitors are just waiting for to explode or implode under its own weight.
As we’ve entered the era of AI, the notion of a product’s efficacy, cost efficiency, marketability, workflow management, and logistics reliability has become increasingly relevant and prevalently impactful. None of this is background noise anymore. It is the difference between bleeding money on traditional media and actually engineering a profitable campaign.
For example, META’s AI Algorithm has finally given us the ability to measure the ‘CREATIVE’ for a business’s promotions. The best part is that we can do so organically. Content that is actually relevant to the target audience gets more views through reach. This tells us exactly how the audience is reacting before we even scale the budget. This is how we have been gifted the ability to provide merit to the madness of the creative process.
So, our process is as follows:
A set of creatives is built for social media
Their performance is closely monitored for reach and engagement.
Based on the best organic performance, we choose the creative.
Make micro adjustments to add a sales proposition and CTA (but keep it subtle)
Publish the modified creative as an ad.
There’s a lot that goes on in between, but this is the basic method for getting it right. And this is just the AI that’s being used by platforms across the world.
AI utilisation is something that has greatly made the creative process a lot easier. As an agency that thrives on coming up with ideas that are out of this world, we have made the most of leveraging AI to bring ideas to life without spending a fortune.
So, this way, the ability to create high-impact brand stories is no longer under the tyrannical gatekeeping of large budget organisations. It is now that merit solely falls on the storyteller.
Now, AI-powered content production and the AI algorithm on Social Media platforms are asking the question: Is your content compelling?. If yes, the audience will watch your content, share it, and engage with it.
And when it comes to keeping budgets down, we can surely say that it holds the capability to execute million-dollar shoots at a fraction of the cost.
For example, we recently came across a creative challenge by a major Real Estate Developer from Gurugram. They had signed a celebrity couple for their brand ambassadorship a few months ago. They were now about to launch their new project, but for some reason, they could not get their shoot done.
What we came up with was to use the likeness of this celebrity couple and place them throughout the project’s feature video. With the help of AI generation, we were able to rebuild a completely new feature video with their brand ambassadors in 2 days, and no additional physical shots were required.
Imagine being able to save 50-60 lakhs in production costs, 15-20 days in production time, and comfortably be ahead of schedule to launch the project.
This has changed the game entirely. With AI, you can now just acquire the likeness rights of celebrities, and you can just build environments and scenarios with them. The balance between creative and artificial intelligence isn’t a battle for control; it is simply the ultimate tool for survival and scale in a landscape that rewards the fastest and the smartest.
