Kiran Gai joins JioStar as associate director, brand solutions

MUMBAI: The great Indian media reshuffle continues, and this time it is JioStar doing the shopping. Kiran gai has joined the network as associate director, brand solutions GCS, sports and entertainment, moving over after four years at Sony Pictures Networks India, where she rose from manager, brand integrations to manager, brand solutions. It is a small move on paper. It is not a small move in substance.

JioStar, the Reliance-Disney media behemoth born out of last year’s mega merger, has spent 2026 doing what dominant players always do after a merger, hoovering up talent from every corner of the industry to build out functions at scale. Brand solutions for sports and entertainment sits right at the intersection of the two businesses JioStar cares about most, live sport rights and marquee entertainment content, and staffing it with someone who has spent nearly seven years cutting her teeth across Mirchi, Network18 and Sony gives the network a ready-made playbook rather than a slow build.

Gai’s trajectory tells its own story about how brand solutions careers are built in Indian media today, not through a single ladder but through lateral hops across audio, digital and television. She started at Mirchi in 2017 handling e-commerce accounts, moved through corporate sales and brand solutions roles across Pune and Bengaluru, jumped to Network18’s branded content team in 2022, then spent four years at Sony rising through integrations and solutions before landing at JioStar this August. Sales forecasting and strategic planning sit at the core of her skill set, unglamorous disciplines that happen to be exactly what a network scaling advertiser relationships across sport and entertainment needs most.

For Sony, the exit is one more data point in a wider pattern. Since the JioStar merger reshaped the competitive map, talent with cross-category brand solutions experience has become the scarcest resource in the business, and networks without the deepest pockets are finding it hard to hold onto people once JioStar comes calling. For JioStar, each hire like this compounds an advantage, deeper bench strength in exactly the function that turns eyeballs into ad revenue.

None of this makes headlines the way a big content launch does. But the quiet accumulation of brand solutions talent is arguably a better leading indicator of who wins the next phase of India’s media wars than any single show premiere. JioStar is not just buying content and cricket rights, it is buying the people who know how to sell both.