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Max expecting to rake in ad revenues of Rs 2.6 billion from World Cup
MUMBAI: With the cricket World Cup scheduled to kick off next week, Sony Entertainment’s Max has got a raft of sponsors on board.
Information available with Indiantelevision.com indicates that Max is expecting to make around Rs 2.6 billion from cricket’s headline event, market sources point out.
As presenting sponsors Max has roped in Pepsi and Nokia. The associate sponsors include Maruti Udyog, ITC Foods, Videocon, Hero Honda, LG and Aditya Birla Group. Set India executive VP Rohit Gupta says that ITC Foods is a new entrant.
There are also a raft of sponsors for Max’s wrap around programming Extraaa Innings. They are Hyundai, Mayur Suitings, Luminous, Bidlite, Visa, Indiagames, Maxwell and Kentaro.
The feeling in some quarters is that the timings will to some extent be more beneficial to male oriented brands. Men are more likely than women to burn the midnight oil to watch the outcome. Media experts point out that for the 2003 World Cup in South Africa, when matches started in the afternoon there was decent sampling even at the start of the matches. Now what kind of viewing there will be post midnight is of course not known, apart from the India matches where it will be strong.
Max has also done special packages. For instance, Fall of Wickets has Hyundai as sponsor, for Super Fours it is Monster.com, Super Sixes by Madhura Garments. For scrollers Max has tied up with LIC, Western Union, Jaguar, Kotak, Naukri.com and Bharatmatrimony. Gupta adds that there will not be more than 60-70 scrollers in a match.
The aim is to ensure brand integration without impacting viewer experience. In a match, Max will have 4800-5200 seconds of advertising, Gupta says. Anymore than that and one runs the danger of ball cutting.
Max was also to have done an initiative Host Ka Dost Hunt where the winner would have been a part of Max’s Extraaa Innings team. That however has not happened. Max business head Sneha Rajani points out that nobody suitable was found.
MAM
Smytten appoints Shishir Varma as CEO of Pulseai Research
Rebranded AI platform scales with 150 plus clients and 30 million users.
MUMBAI: In a world obsessed with what consumers say, Smytten is betting on what they actually do. The company has appointed Shishir Varma as chief executive officer of Pulseai Research, signalling a sharper push into AI-led, behaviour-driven consumer insights. The move comes as Smytten rebrands its insights vertical from Smytten PulseAI to Pulseai Research, marking a shift away from traditional, project-based research towards a more continuous, intelligence-led model.
Varma brings over 30 years of global experience across APAC markets, including India, China and Japan. Most recently managing director, Insights at Kantar Japan, he has built and scaled consumer insight businesses across geographies, including playing a key role in establishing Millward Brown in India. His mandate now: turn Pulseai into a category-defining platform in a space still dominated by surveys and static reports.
The pitch is straightforward but ambitious. Instead of relying on claimed responses, Pulseai Research taps into observed behaviour leveraging Smytten’s ecosystem of 30 million users built over a decade of product discovery, trials and purchases. The idea is to close the long-standing gap between what consumers claim and how they actually behave.
The numbers suggest early traction. In under 18 months, the platform has onboarded over 150 enterprise clients across sectors, pointing to growing demand for faster, more reliable alternatives to legacy research models.
Under the hood, the platform blends behavioural data with AI and large language model-led analysis to deliver real-time sentiment tracking, scalable qualitative insights, faster quantitative studies and always-on brand intelligence. In practical terms, that means compressing research timelines from weeks to days without sacrificing depth.
The ambition extends beyond FMCG. Pulseai Research is positioning itself as a cross-category intelligence layer, spanning auto, education, gadgets and emerging consumer segments anywhere behaviour-rich data can sharpen decision-making.
For Smytten, the leadership hire is less about optics and more about direction. With Varma at the helm, the company is leaning into a simple but powerful premise: in the age of AI, insight isn’t just about asking better questions, it’s about watching more closely.
