MAM
Abhishek Bhattacharya joins JioStar as senior director and national agency head
MUMBAI: Abhishek Bhattacharya has raced into JioStar as senior director and national head of agency partnerships for the entertainment business, charged with tightening the company’s grip on India’s sprawling media market.
With two decades spent navigating India’s advertising maze, Bhattacharya brings a playbook honed across screens, sports and experiential formats. He has led Rs 100-crore campaigns on Star Sports and previously contributed more than Rs 500 crore annually to network revenues. At JioStar, he is expected to fuse linear TV muscle with digital acceleration to give brands a sharper, full-stack media route.
Bhattacharya joined JioStar earlier this year to lead agency partnerships across Omnicom Media Group, IPG Mediabrands, Dentsu and DDB Mudra, before stepping into the national role. His remit now spans relationship strategy, revenue growth and building integrated solutions across linear TV, connected TV and mobile.
Before JioStar, Bhattacharya spent seven years at Disney Star, rising through the sports vertical and stitching together high-impact associations for brands such as Cadbury, Boost, Tata Neu, Audi and Parle. He also held roles at ITW Consulting, Bloomberg TV India, Bennett Coleman, ABP Group, HT Media and Ushakiron Movies.
A career stitched together by sport, screens and storytelling is now primed for its next sprint. JioStar’s partnership engine will be running hotter.
Brands
IICT partners with Gativedhi to bring studio production tools to students
New MoU lets students explore AI-driven production pipelines for AVGC-XR
MUMBAI: The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) has teamed up with Gativedhi Technologies to give students a front-row seat to modern studio production. The collaboration will integrate Gativedhi’s AI-powered production intelligence platform, Shotrack, into academic programmes, letting students experience the workflow systems used by animation, VFX and gaming studios.
Under the MoU, faculty, students and researchers will get hands-on access to Shotrack through beta programmes, pilot deployments and academic evaluations. This will allow them to explore simulated production pipelines, understand asset management, track tasks and monitor schedules, essentially seeing how complex projects come together behind the scenes.
Shotrack is designed to tackle a key industry challenge: when multiple studios work on the same project, differing internal systems often create bottlenecks, slow approvals and complicate version control. The platform provides a unified production environment, enabling smoother collaboration across distributed teams while generating operational insights and predictive analytics to optimise crew allocation, forecast schedule risks and manage costs.
The collaboration also opens doors to Gativedhi’s wider ecosystem. Upcoming tools include StudioTrack, for studio operations management covering budgeting, recruitment and IT infrastructure, and WorkTrack, which measures workflow efficiency and team productivity across industries.
IICT plans to embed these tools into programmes covering animation pipelines, VFX workflows, gaming production and media project management. Students will also benefit from guest lectures, masterclasses, workshops, internships and research projects that connect academic learning with real-world studio practices.
IICT CEO Vishwas Deoskar, said the partnership provides “An environment where production pipeline tools can be explored, tested and refined while students gain insight into how large-scale productions are organised.”
Gativedhi Technologies founder & CEO Senthil Kumar added, “This collaboration introduces students to real-world studio management tools and helps us improve our platform with academic feedback.”
With Shotrack in classrooms, India’s future animators, VFX artists and gaming producers will get a taste of studio life long before they step into one.
