Amazon hires media veteran Baishali Chatterjee to run India communications for Prime Video

MUMBAI: Baishali Chatterjee has joined Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios as head of communications, India, capping an 18-year career spent bouncing between newsrooms, glossy magazines and the PR trenches of Mumbai’s entertainment industry.

The appointment, which took effect this month, hands Chatterjee the job of shaping the narrative for one of the country’s most-watched streaming and studio operations at a time when competition for eyeballs, and column inches, has never been fiercer. She will work alongside Serena Menon, with whom she says she is “looking forward to partnering.”

Chatterjee arrives after three and a half years as an independent communications consultant, a stint in which she juggled briefs for Netflix, Vogue, Reliance, Flipkart and Unilever without the safety net of a single employer. Before that she ran communications for Lakmé Salon, Dermalogica India and TIGI India as head of communications at Lakmé Lever.

Her CV reads like a tour of Indian media itself. She cut her teeth as a sub-editor and web writer for Zee Network in the late 2000s, rose through Spenta Multimedia and Femina, eventually running the latter’s editorial desk across four cities, then crossed over to the agency side at MSLGROUP India, where she led publicity for Netflix India and Audible India as associate director.

That trajectory, from newsroom grunt to studio’s chief storyteller, is not accidental. Communications chiefs at streaming giants increasingly come from journalism and magazines rather than corporate PR, on the theory that only someone who has chased a story knows how to plant one.

For Amazon, the hire signals intent: as Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios jostle for supremacy in India’s crowded streaming market, having a seasoned newsroom hand steering the message may prove as valuable as any content slate. Chatterjee, for her part, calls it a responsibility she does not take lightly. Rivals in the streaming pack should take note: the narrative battle just got a formidable new general.