MAM
YAAP appoints Smriti Shadra as director-content
MUMBAI: Rainmaker Ventures-backed YAAP has announced the appointment of Smriti Shadra as director-content. She will be based out of the Mumbai office and will report directly to YAAP chief creative officer Deepak Singh.
Speaking on her appointment, Singh said, “Smriti is one of the young and upcoming talents in the industry; with a rare body of work spanning across multiple mediums. We are happy to have her on board; as she is a perfect fit for an offbeat culture that we are looking to create with a team of people having diversified skill sets. I am confident that she will play an integral role in raising the bar of our creative output while leading a team of people from varied backgrounds.”
Commenting on her new role, Shadra, added, “Deepak is very clear about the vision that he has for YAAP, and I am more than happy to be a part of it. Advertising today is continuously changing, so the need of the hour is to evolve with the times. This will surely be an interesting move, as it’ll help me explore a dynamic medium like digital in combination with the design. I'm certainly looking forward to pushing the boundaries and creating some path-breaking work with Deepak.”
Smriti has worked with agencies such as Grey Worldwide, JWT, Leo Burnett, Dentsu India Group, and The Social Street. During her previous tenures, she has worked on brands like DHL, Star, MRF, Britannia, Maruti Suzuki, Max Healthcare, Airtel, The Indian Express, Fortis Healthcare, Madhya Pradesh Police, SBI Cards, Twinings, MOHAN Foundation and Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders Society of India.
She has around 190 Indian and International awards to her credit; across various categories and has been a jury member at The MAA Worldwide Globes, The ABBYS, and The EMVIES. In 2017, Smriti was chosen as an Adobe Young Lantern, acknowledged and judged by the finest jury in the country.
The YAAP Group works with brands like Dubai Tourism, ITC Hotels, Lufthansa, Coca Cola, American Express, SBI Cards, SHRM, NPCI, Assam Tourism along with more than 50 other brands.
MAM
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.
