Ankit Pandey rejoins Sony Pictures Networks as group head, sports ad sales

MUMBAI: Ankit Pandey has gone home. After ten months at JioStar Sports Ads steering some of the biggest cricket properties in the country, Pandey has rejoined Sony Pictures Networks India as group head, ad sales, sports, marking his second stint with the network and putting him back in charge of brand partnerships and sports marketing across the Sony Sports Network stable. For an executive whose entire career has been built on live sport and television scale, the move reads less like a job change and more like a homecoming, a framing Pandey himself has embraced.

The numbers he leaves behind at JioStar are hard to ignore. As associate director, sports, for TV and digital, Pandey delivered over Rs 240 crore in advertising revenue across bilateral cricket and the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, growing the bilateral cricket business by a staggering 243 per cent year on year, from Rs 10.7 crore to Rs 36.8 crore, with 89 per cent of that revenue coming from new business. He also hit 101 per cent of the revenue target for the T20 World Cup, generating Rs 204.15 crore in commercial revenue through integrated sponsorship solutions, and built partnerships with brands as varied as OpenAI, Bajaj Finserv, SBI Life and Crompton. Notably, he spearheaded the commercialisation of OpenAI’s Prompt of the Day, turning it into one of the tournament’s flagship branded content properties, a rare example of an AI brand finding genuine cultural traction in Indian cricket sponsorship.

Pandey’s career arc before JioStar reads like a checklist of Indian sports and entertainment broadcasting, three years at Sony Pictures Networks working on Hindi movie advertising, three and a half years at Viacom18 driving revenue for the Nickelodeon cluster, and an earlier stint at Amagi Media Labs managing inventory across Zee’s channel portfolio. That breadth across kids’ entertainment, Hindi cinema and now marquee cricket gives him a rare vantage point on how advertisers think across genres, not just sport, a skill set Sony will be keen to deploy as it doubles down on live sports as appointment viewing in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

Pandey’s own words on the move lean into conviction rather than nostalgia, insisting that despite the proliferation of screens and platforms, live sport on television retains a scale and shared experience that no other format can replicate. For Sony, bringing back an executive who has just posted some of the sharpest revenue growth numbers in Indian cricket sponsorship is as clear a statement of intent as any, sports advertising remains the crown jewel of Indian broadcasting, and the network wants its best dealmakers back in the room.