AD Agencies
Eighteen years on, Ormax Media proves the case for staying curious
A milestone that owes less to luck than to a habit of asking the right questions
- MUMBAI: Anniversaries in business are usually vanity exercises. This one is not. Ormax Media, a Mumbai-based research and consulting firm serving India’s film, television and streaming businesses, this week marked 18 years in an industry that has reinvented itself at least three times over that span, and has, by any sensible measure, thrived through every rewrite. The note marking the occasion came from Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of the firm, and it read like a genuine reflection on nearly two decades of work.
- The numbers tell a plain story of staying power. More than 100 companies across the entertainment value chain, studios, broadcasters, streaming platforms and producers, have worked with the firm at one point or another, a client list broad enough to double as a map of Indian media itself. More than 100 people have passed through its ranks too, many now scattered across the industry, carrying Ormax’s training and thinking with them. That is not attrition; it is influence, quietly compounding.
- What stands out most, though, is the temperament behind the track record. Kapoor’s own account of the journey is refreshingly unshowy: pride, sure, but pride tempered by a genuine appetite for self-scrutiny. That combination is rarer than it sounds, and it is arguably the reason the firm has lasted this long. India’s media and entertainment industry has been anything but static across these 18 years: satellite television’s high-water mark, the multiplex era, and now the still-shifting economics of streaming, where subscriber numbers, engagement and advertising rupees are all being rewritten in real time. A research and consulting business that survives, and indeed grows, through all of that is one that has earned its relevance the hard way, by staying useful to clients navigating a moving target, year after year.
- That is the real achievement here. It is easy to be sharp for a season; it is much harder to remain indispensable for 18 years in a business where the questions worth asking keep changing. Kapoor’s answer, it seems, has been to treat curiosity as infrastructure, something built into how the firm works, not a mood that shows up occasionally. The result is a body of products, tools and frameworks shaped directly by the challenges clients have thrown at the firm, rather than developed in isolation and hoped into relevance.
- There is also something worth noting about the people side of the story. Kapoor was particularly generous in his note about the core team that has stayed with him for a large part of these 18 years, a group he credits with giving him, and each other, the freedom to think differently and challenge assumptions. In a services business, that kind of continuity is close to the ultimate vote of confidence, both in the work and in each other. Institutional memory of that sort is difficult to build and easy to lose; keeping it intact while the industry around you changes shape is a genuine feat.
- Eighteen years wise, eighteen years young, Kapoor himself was not entirely sure which description fit better in his note, and perhaps he does not need to decide. Judged by the firm’s staying power, its client base and the industry’s continuing reliance on its insight, both descriptions fit rather well. Many happy returns to Ormax Media, and to the next chapter of an industry it has helped make sense of.
