Shreyas Kasaralkar joins Zee Media as AVP–marketing and regional head

MUMBAI: Shreyas Kasaralkar has gone back to where, in some ways, it all began. The marketing veteran has joined Zee Media Corporation Limited as assistant vice president, marketing and regional head, taking charge of brand strategy across Zee Business, Zee 24 Taas and Zee 24 Kalak. It is a homecoming of sorts. Kasaralkar cut his teeth on Zee 24 Taas over a decade ago as senior manager, marketing, between 2012 and 2015, before building a career that spanned some of India’s biggest media houses. He returns now not as a manager on one channel, but as the executive owning marketing across three.

The résumé he brings back with him is a formidable one. Kasaralkar spent over two years, from April 2023 to May 2025, as GM and head of brand marketing for IPs, new product initiatives and live entertainment at Bennett Coleman & Co, the company behind The Times of India. There, he is credited with turning a Rs 10 crore operating loss into a Rs 3 crore surplus, a swing of Rs 13 crore, while driving a 230 per cent improvement in profitability across flagship Times Group properties such as Times Fresh Face and Times Creators Awards. Before that, he spent over six years, from 2016 to 2022, as head of marketing at Red FM, where he built and monetised over 40 experiential IPs and drove 23 per cent revenue growth across four markets, including new market launches in Surat, Nanded and Dhule.

His earlier innings only add to the case. At ABP Network, as brand head of marketing for ABP Majha, Kasaralkar helped the channel defend its number one position while launching branded IPs that delivered a 12 per cent revenue uplift. At Zee Media the first time round, he took Zee 24 Taas from the third spot to a strong second, engineering a 24 per cent jump in reach through live events and city-wise activations. Further back still, at Disney Star, he scaled STAR Pravah into the top Marathi channel, pushing GRPs from 90 to 400, and at Mindshare India he managed media budgets exceeding Rs 300 crore for Hindustan Unilever’s flagship brands.

What makes this appointment interesting is the breadth of the mandate. Regional news is a famously competitive, low-margin battlefield in India, and Zee Media’s three-channel stable, spanning business news and two strong regional players in Marathi and Gujarati, needs a marketer who can move fluidly between languages, markets and genres. Kasaralkar’s record suggests exactly that kind of range, having worked across radio, print-led experiential platforms, general entertainment and regional news within a single career.

The appointment also fits a broader pattern of media houses reaching for battle-tested IP and brand builders rather than pure marketing generalists, particularly as monetisation pressures mount across legacy news and entertainment properties. Kasaralkar’s specialism lies precisely there: converting audience attention into sponsorship revenue and building branded platforms that outlive a single campaign cycle. For Zee Media, betting on someone who has already engineered turnarounds at Times Group and Red FM is a statement of intent. For Kasaralkar, it is a chance to apply two decades of brand-building rigour to the network where his career in Indian media truly took shape.