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VDO.AI's Santosh Khandekar Joins JioStar as Director, Entertainment Pricing and Digital Ad Products

Ad Tribe! Bureau1 min read
Santosh Khandekar, who joins JioStar's entertainment pricing and digital ad products team

Santosh Khandekar has left video-tech platform VDO.AI to join JioStar as Director of Entertainment Pricing and Digital Ad Products, taking on a role focused on how the combined media house prices and packages its digital advertising inventory.

  • Appointee: Santosh Khandekar
  • New role: Director, Entertainment Pricing and Digital Ad Products, JioStar
  • Previous company: VDO.AI

Digital Ad Product Talent Consolidating at JioStar

JioStar, formed from the merger of Reliance's and Disney's Indian media assets, continues to build out specialised leadership across its digital advertising and monetisation stack as it integrates streaming, television and digital inventory under one roof following one of the largest media consolidations in the Indian market. A dedicated pricing and digital ad products role reflects the scale of the challenge: unifying ad pricing logic across a combined entertainment portfolio that spans linear TV, JioCinema-style streaming and connected TV inventory, each of which historically carried its own pricing conventions before the merger brought them together.

What the Move Signals About Video-Ad Talent Flow

Khandekar's move from a video-tech and programmatic-focused platform like VDO.AI into a large integrated media house is part of a broader talent pattern, as India's biggest broadcasters and streamers increasingly recruit from ad-tech and video-monetisation companies to build out sophisticated, data-driven pricing capabilities for their digital and CTV inventory rather than relying purely on traditional television ad-sales expertise. As connected TV viewership grows in India and advertisers demand more programmatic, data-backed buying options across streaming platforms, the skill set built at pure-play video-tech companies is becoming increasingly valuable inside the country's largest broadcasters, a shift this appointment reflects directly.

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