Digital
AI helps us optimise various aspects of our performance marketing campaigns: Sri Hari Cuddapah
Mumbai: GenY Medium is a full-service digital marketing agency with offices in Hyderabad, Delhi, Bangalore and Toronto that has completed 12 years of operations this year. GenY has a team of 100 digital experts providing specialized services in paid media, creative, brand strategy, SEO, marketing technology and digital transformation consulting.
Sri Hari Cuddapah brings a great amount of experience as chief business officer of GenY Medium- a specialised digital marketing agency. With his five years of dedicated service at GenY Medium, he has been a great asset to the organization. His expertise covers a range of industries, including consumer goods, real estate, education, healthcare, venture capital, and direct-to-consumer (D2C) markets.
Indiantelevision.com caught up with Cuddapah where he shared more interesting insights on Al integration, performance marketing, digital transformation and a lot more…
Edited excerpts
On AI integration transforming performance marketing at GenY Medium, and some specific examples of its impact on your campaigns
AI helps us optimise various aspects of our performance marketing campaigns. Previously, most kinds of optimizations such as time of day, placement, audience subsegments etc. were done manually. We had to get a lot of campaign data and adjust bids to optimize the above parameters. Now, AI optimizes most of these hygiene parameters depending on the campaign performance. Secondly, when we give external signals such as offline conversions, existing audience lists etc., AI uses this to sharpen the campaign targeting, saving us many hours in creating and testing extremely niche audience personas.
On ensuring marketing strategies comply with privacy regulations while still achieving high performance
On the data security perspective – Most of our clients’ customer data does not reside with us. It resides on the clients’ servers. We access encrypted data, directly pushing it to advertising platforms to build audience signals.
On the privacy perspective – We do not collect any personal data without consent. All the collected data is stored securely in cloud infrastructure. Customers have an option to opt out of the funnel at any given point of time. We do not use personalized advertising practices which most people would consider an invasion of privacy. And finally with the phasing out of cookies, we use server side tagging to pass first party data securely, in an encrypted day to all data storage locations. With advertising platforms already having strong policies on data privacy, most of the concern is already taken care of.
On the frameworks and methodologies GenY Medium uses to revolutionize decision-making in digital transformation consulting
While building a solution, we take a top down approach. We start off with a high level questionnaire on the clients’ objectives and problem statements. We use the BCG digital maturity model to assess the current state of a company’s maturity and we classify it into one of the 4 stages – Nascent, Emerging, Connected and Multi moment. Each of these stages requires a different step of a customized action plan. We use that to build a customized solution for the client as a first cut. The first cut is then refined by putting in the clients’ current state of infrastructure. We complete the implementation of this as a first step to address low hanging fruits with minimal business disruption. We take on additional incremental enhancements to move them further on the maturity curve. There is no cookie cutter approach to planning a transformation journey. While there are guiding principles and must haves, most of the solution needs to be built around the current, unique situation of each company.
On the role of technology playing in improving decision-making processes for your clients, and specific tools or platforms have been most effective
We primarily use technology to build full funnel customer acquisition visibility for our clients’ campaigns. This starts from setup of unique IDs for audience cohorts to capturing touchpoints leading to a final conversion. While the entire funnel is set up, we can accurately establish the impact and ROI of each rupee spent on digital. One could pinpoint which audience cohort is performing better and which communication is driving the most impact. Once these measurement measures are in place, we use some of the bottom funnel signals to improve the overall campaign performance. We primarily use Meta and Google platforms for ad serving. The leads and conversions are passed to a CRM of choice using zapier. And again using zapier we push back offline events back to advertising platforms to improve the performance. We use power BI, SQL and looker studio to process and visualize the campaign data. These reports point to performance of each geography, audience cohort and many more such dimensions which let the client understand what to tweak.
On common challenges your clients face during digital transformation, and how do you help them overcome these obstacles
While undertaking these projects, there are layers of challenges. While most companies start off on the path to explore the digital path for their marketing needs, the management struggles to give sufficient bandwidth. A new channel of marketing cannot be established at arms length and it requires the senior management to be available to make changes to their operating processes to accommodate new workflows of digital. We set up milestones and cadences which enable them to mark off time and attention to oversee a step by step execution. Another issue is that many clients are not equipped to initiate transformation projects – both from an infrastructure and team capability perspective. This takes a bit of handholding and extrapolation of offline marketing principles to bring the client side team on the same page.
On future trends you foresee in AI that will further redefine performance marketing
AI will further reduce the heavy lifting from performance marketing. Most marketers would like to be obsessed with their customers, finding deeper insights, creating compelling stories and solving their everyday problems. Currently (an improvement from the past) performance marketing involves a lot of structured experimentation, tech implementation and number crunching. This practice favored the tech and number savvy to win at performance marketing. Now the balance is again shifting back to marketers who carefully study their customers’ buying behaviors. AI will further sharpen targeting, bringing down efforts to create hypotheses to find the right customers. It will also learn from your campaigns about your ideal customer, their likes, dislikes to influence their purchase behavior. It will help maximize sales by minimizing the time you put in.
Digital
Content India 2026 opens with a copro pitch, a spice evangelist and a £10,000 prize for Indian storytelling
Dish TV and C21Media’s three-day summit puts seven ambitious projects before an international jury, and two walk away with serious development money
MUMBAI: India’s content industry gathered in Mumbai this March for Content India 2026, a three-day summit organised by Dish TV in partnership with C21Media, and it wasted no time making a statement. The event opened with a Copro Pitch that put seven scripted and unscripted television concepts before an international panel of judges, and by the end of it, two projects had walked away with £10,000 each in marketing prize money from C21Media to support development and international promotion.
The jury, comprising Frank Spotnitz, Fiona Campbell, Rashmi Bajpai, Bal Samra and Rachel Glaister, evaluated a shortlist that ranged from a dark Mumbai comedy-drama about mental health (Dirty Minds, created by Sundar Aaron) to a Delhi coming-of-age mystery (Djinn Patrol, by Neha Sharma and Kilian Irwin), a techno-thriller about a teenage gaming prodigy (Kanpur X Satori, by Suchita Bhatia), an investigative crime drama blending mythology and modern thriller (The Age of Kali, by Shivani Bhatija), a documentary on India’s spice heritage (The Masala Quest, hosted by Sarina Kamini), a documentary on competitive gaming (Respawn: India’s Esports Revolution, by George Mangala Thomas and Sangram Mawari), and a reality-horror competition merging gaming and immersive fear (Scary Goose, by Samar Iqbal).
The session was hosted by Mayank Shekhar.
The two winners were Djinn Patrol, backed by Miura Kite, formerly of Participant Media and known for Chinatown and Keep Sweet: Pray & Obey, with Jaya Entertainment, producers of Real Kashmir Football Club, also attached; and The Masala Quest, created and hosted by Sarina Kamini, an Indian-Australian cook, author and self-described “spice evangelist.”
The summit also unveiled the Content India Trends Report, whose findings made for bracing reading. Daoud Jackson, senior analyst at OMDIA, set the tone: “By 2030, online video in India will nearly double the revenue of traditional TV, becoming the main driver of growth.” He noted that in 2025, India produced a quarter of all YouTube videos globally, overtaking the United States, while Indians collectively spend 117 years daily on YouTube and 72 years on Instagram. Traditional subscription TV is declining as free TV and connected TV gain ground, forcing broadcasters to innovate. “AI-generated content is just 2 per cent of engagement,” Jackson added, “highlighting the dominance of high-quality human content. The key for Indian media companies is scaling while monetising effectively from day one.”
Hannah Walsh, principal analyst at Ampere Analysis, added hard numbers to the picture. India produced over 24,000 titles in January 2026 alone, with 19,000 available internationally. The country now accounts for 12 per cent of Asia-Pacific content spend, up from 8 per cent in 2021, outpacing both Japan and China. Key exporters include JioStar, Zee Entertainment, Sony India, Amazon and Netflix, delivering over 7,500 Indian-produced titles abroad each year. The top importing markets are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, the United States and the Philippines. Scripted content dominates globally at 88 per cent, with crime dramas and children’s and family titles performing particularly strongly.
Manoj Dobhal, chief executive and executive director of Dish TV India, framed the summit’s ambition squarely. “Stories don’t need translation. They need a platform, discovery, and reach, local or global,” he said. “India produces more movies than any country, our streaming platforms compete globally, and our tech and creators win international awards. Yet fragmentation slows growth. Producers, platforms, and tech move in different lanes. We need shared spaces, collaboration, and an ecosystem where ideas, technology, and people meet. That is why we built Content India.”
The data, the pitches and the prize money all pointed to the same conclusion: India is not waiting for the world to discover its stories. It is building the infrastructure to sell them.
