MAM
Akshay Surve promoted to senior marketing associate at JioStar sports
From Sony Sports to Wimbledon, the ad-industry-trained sports storyteller has now spent nearly a decade building campaigns for the biggest names in the game
MUMBAI: Sports marketing in India has a habit of rewarding people who genuinely love the game as much as the craft, and Akshay Surve fits that mould squarely. He has moved into a new role as senior marketing associate, marketing excellence, in JioStar’s sports vertical, promoted from within after just eight months at the company. Given the breadth of live sporting properties he has already handled there, from the ICC T20 World Cup to Wimbledon, the elevation looks less like a lucky break and more like an obvious next step.
Surve joined JioStar in February this year on social media marketing, where his brief covered day-to-day publishing and real-time content execution across some of the biggest properties on the calendar, including the ICC T20 World Cup 2026, Tata IPL 2026, the Women’s T20 World Cup, India’s tour of England and Wimbledon 2026. Beyond routine posting, he ran moment marketing initiatives, spotting key match moments and shaping stats-led and static creatives to drive engagement in real time, precisely the kind of fast-turnaround content work that separates good sports social teams from great ones.
What makes his profile stand out is the sheer range of sports and agency experience feeding into it. Before JioStar, Surve spent time at Sportwalk as key account manager, running content calendars and on-ground coverage for clients including Kalinga Lancers, Legends Pro T20 and Global Sports Pickleball, and interned at Impetus Sports on partnerships and sponsorship strategy, scouting brand fit across marathons and cricket leagues. He also did a stint at CricViz as a broadcast data analyst during the IPL and T20 World Cup 2024, giving him a data-literate edge that pure content marketers often lack.
His earlier career adds an advertising pedigree to the sports specialism. Surve worked as brand service manager at MullenLowe Lintas Group on accounts including Eureka Forbes and Runwal, and before that as brand associate at L&K Saatchi & Saatchi managing celebrity shoots and festive campaigns. Further back still, at Scarecrow Communications, he handled Sony Sports properties spanning the Olympics, Euro 2020, the Ashes and the Australian Open, and was part of the team that launched the Prime Volleyball League, India’s first ever volleyball competition. That is a genuinely rare combination, mainline advertising discipline married to hands-on sports broadcast marketing, built over five-plus years and a postgraduate qualification in sports management.
JioStar promoting him into a marketing excellence role after less than a year says something about how quickly that combination has proven its worth. Sports marketing at the scale JioStar operates, running content across the country’s most-watched cricket and global properties simultaneously, needs people who understand both brand strategy and the split-second instincts live sport demands. On the evidence of his run so far, Surve looks well placed to keep delivering exactly that.
