iWorld
boAt announces leadership expansion; onboards P Narayan, C Awasthi as business and HR heads
Mumbai: Imagine Marketing, which owns the market-leading wireless hearables and wearables brand boAt has announced several new appointments to the leadership team, affirming its focus to building a top-notch team to unleash the next phase of growth. The company has increased its workforce by over 110 employees and is now over 300 boAtheads strong.
Key additions include:
Prejith Narayan, the chief business officer, brings over 12 years of experience after serving industry juggernauts like Amazon, Aditya Birla Group and IBM. During his stint at Amazon, Prejith led multiple key categories like wireless audio, wearables, PCA and beauty.
Charmie Awasthi, recently appointed as chief human resource officer brings with her a rich professional experience of over 17 years with media conglomerates like Viacom18 and Zee Entertainment. During her professional career, she has partnered with & consulted business leaders on people strategy and practices to enable organisational growth and development. She specialises in organisation design, leadership development, change management, coaching & mentoring and performance management.
Shyam Vedantam, who has joined the deck as a chief product delivery officer, comes with over two decades of rich experience as a tech business leader and an entrepreneur. From building products to scaling businesses, he has previously served large enterprises including Harman and GE along with start-ups across US, India, and the Asia Pacific.
Rakshit Gupta will be responsible for spearheading the CX initiatives as the head of customer experience at boAt. His diverse experience in areas like strategy, product, and operations across Swiggy, The Boston Consulting Group, and Flipkart, is certain to add a tremendous value to all the new customer delight initiatives that the company is set to usher in.
Vibhor Jain, recently appointed as the head of e-commerce, brings to the table a span of experiences across e-commerce, electronics, and FMCG sector with industry giants like Tata Cliq, Appario Retail, Patanjali, and TCS where he worked in roles across corporate strategy, business development and category management.
Essaying roles in brand strategy, market research, innovation, P&L management and new product development; Aman Brara has recently joined as the head of wearables. Known for scaling up business and brands, he has worked with Reckitt and Godrej Consumer Products in the past and is truly passionate about taking the category to new heights.
Imagine Marketing CEO Vivek Gambhir said, “Over the years, under the inspiring leadership of Aman and Sameer, our co-founders, the company has been successful in rapidly scaling up the business and delivering profitable growth. For our next phase of growth, we are elated to expand our team and welcome dynamic and talented leaders who will help us chart the way and take Imagine Marketing to the next level. As we grow, we will continue to scout for great talent to add across multiple functions.”
Gaming
India’s broadcasters say no to Fifa World Cup 2026
Fifa has slashed its asking price by 65 per cent but India’s broadcasters are still not buying
MUMBAI: The world’s biggest sporting event cannot find a single taker in the world’s most sports-mad nation. Fifa’s television rights for the 2026 World Cup remain unsold in India, and the clock is ticking loudly.
To shift the property, world football’s governing body has already swallowed hard and cut its asking price from $100m to $35m, bundling in the 2030 edition as a sweetener. It has not worked. Indian broadcasters have looked at the offer, done the sums and quietly walked away.
The reasons are brutally simple. The 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, kicks off in a time zone that turns India’s primetime into a graveyard shift. Most matches will air between midnight and 7am IST, a scheduling catastrophe for advertisers chasing mass reach. The 2022 Qatar edition was a gift by comparison, with matches dropping neatly into Indian evenings. North America offers no such luxury.
The market itself has also changed beyond recognition. The merger of Star India and Viacom18 into JioStar has gutted the competitive tension that once sent sports rights prices soaring. Where rival bidders once slugged it out, there is now a single dominant buyer, and it is in no hurry. JioStar has valued the rights at roughly $25m, a full $10m below Fifa’s already-discounted floor price. That gap has so far proved unbridgeable.
Broadcasters are also nursing a ferocious cricket hangover. Between 2022 and 2023, Indian media houses committed well over $10bn to cricket rights alone, covering IPL, ICC events and BCCI domestic fixtures combined. After a binge of that scale, appetite for a football package that delivers a fraction of the ratings, in the dead of night, is close to zero.
The economics of football broadcasting make the maths even harder. Cricket, with its natural breaks every few overs, is an advertiser’s paradise. Football offers a 15-minute halftime and precious little else. Recovering a nine-figure rights fee from a single half-hour ad window is a stretch at the best of times. These are not the best of times: the Indian government’s tightening grip on real-money gaming and gambling advertising has vaporised a category that once underwrote the economics of big sporting events.
Nor is the World Cup an anomaly. Indian Super League valuations have cratered. English Premier League rights have softened across successive cycles. The cooling of football as a broadcast commodity in India is structural, not cyclical.
With the tournament opening on 11th June, Fifa is running out of road. It may yet blink and meet JioStar at $25m. Or it may go direct, streaming the entire tournament on its own platform, Fifa+, or cutting a digital deal with YouTube, and hoping that a generation of Indian football fans finds its way there without a broadcaster to guide them.
Either way, the beautiful game’s Indian chapter is looking decidedly ugly.
