DishTV appoints Bhaskar Rawat as vice president, growth

NOIDA: Building sustainable growth in a crowded consumer market requires more than acquiring customers. It demands sharper analytics, stronger retention and better subscription economics. DishTV has appointed Bhaskar Rawat as vice president, growth, adding an executive with experience across telecom, OTT aggregation and consumer businesses.

Rawat joins DishTV in October 2026 after serving as head of growth at OTTplay, part of HT Media Group, from March 2025 to September 2026. At OTTplay, he led growth and analytics across performance marketing, lifecycle management and acquisition partnerships, with a focus on improving long-term subscription economics in a market characterised by high customer acquisition costs (CAC) and increasingly commoditised content catalogues.

His work included managing Meta and Google acquisition campaigns, overseeing the subscriber profit and loss (P&L) across acquisition, retention and win-back, and reallocating budgets using cohort lifetime value (LTV) and marginal return on investment (ROI). He also developed distribution partnerships across quick commerce, fintech and business-to-consumer platforms to create lower-cost acquisition channels beyond paid media.

At OTTplay, Rawat drove subscription revenue growth of more than 50 per cent year on year. He also worked on onboarding, engagement, renewal and win-back journeys, alongside pricing and offer strategies to improve average revenue per user (ARPU). Cashback partnerships with payment apps and experiments across acquisition journeys improved click-through rates by around 20 per cent while protecting margins.

Before OTTplay, Rawat was head of customer lifecycle management for health and wellness at RP Sanjiv Goenka Group from November 2023 to March 2025. He built customer lifecycle management, marketing technology infrastructure and analytics capabilities for Dr. Vaidya’s and three60. His work included growing retention revenue by around 30 per cent and delivering three times return on advertising spend (ROAS) through RFM and cohort-based customer segmentation.

He also led lifecycle journeys, performance marketing and AI-led marketing technology initiatives, including chatbot integration and data architecture spanning CleverTap, Amplitude, Snowflake and Google Analytics 4. Lifecycle optimisation and cross-selling initiatives helped take four products to product-market fit.

Earlier, Rawat served as deputy general manager for usage and revenue analytics at Jio from July 2022 to October 2023. He led analysis of recharge behaviour, churn, retention and customer segmentation across a subscriber base of more than 400 million users. His responsibilities also included targeting analytics for the 5G and AirFiber rollout, as well as providing customer behaviour insights to Jio Financial Services to support credit-risk targeting and pre-approved loan models.

Rawat spent nearly four years at Airtel, from October 2018 to July 2022, as senior manager, marketing. In Mumbai, he led prepaid growth and operations for a circle generating Rs 1,200 crore in annual revenue. His responsibilities covered subscriber revenue management, lifecycle campaigns, sales operations, go-to-market execution and competitive retention. He later moved to Airtel’s national usage and retention function, focusing on churn reduction and interventions across circles.

His earlier experience includes product strategy at Lava International, where he led market intelligence and competitive tracking for the mobile devices business, and strategy and management consulting at Avalon Consulting. At Avalon, his assignments included growth strategy, commercial due diligence, feasibility studies and market assessments across sectors. He began his career in application development and maintenance at Headstrong.

Rawat’s career spans growth strategy, analytics, customer lifecycle management, subscription monetisation and product strategy. His appointment comes as digital and subscription businesses place greater emphasis on efficient customer acquisition, retention and lifetime value, making the ability to connect data-led decision-making with commercial outcomes an important growth capability.