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How COVID-19 will change live events
Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel.” This was is the bedrock of every live experience. The ones that we remember most vividly are the ones that made us feel most ‘a-live’. And over the years with the advent of technology, communication, internet, this feeling can be enhanced with these tools.
The pandemic, however, has made a swift incision at the heart of the live event business. If you just look at the figures pouring in from different sources about the estimation of current losses, they are a staggering Rs 3000 crore in just two months in India alone. More than 10 million people employed in the industry have been impacted. It will, if it hasn’t already, force the industry to rethink its strategy entirely. The consumer journey is now different– the touch and feel of in person events is not involved right now. Going virtual, using technology and design thinking, is the need of the hour. We have already seen many platforms including venues like NCPA that have taken the staged experiences and brought them home. Ticket booking platforms like BookMyShow have widened their canvas to include online fitness classes and dance classes. Experiences that you never thought could be enjoyed sitting indoors, like Theatre, have already started adapting to the small screen format of your laptops and mobiles.
Can it be shown as it was on stage? Maybe.
Can it be made better to include the new consumption process? Absolutely.
That’s what will set the best experiences apart. It cannot be just a LIVE on ground experience anymore. It will have to be a Mixed Reality Experience.
Once things come back to normal, yes, events will happen again. In my opinion though, two things will need to be now evaluated:
What kind of experiences are the consumers seeking – those who are attending live and those who are not?
How will the event industry design an experience within this environment? It will have to move ahead from just another ‘Going live on a social media platform’. It will need to be more integrated.
Emotional connect will have to be elicited through consumers’ devices. Not just event managers but even artists will need to rethink their delivery of the experience. In India, thankfully, the event industry has a body like EEMA that enables discussions, debates and innovations and in unprecedented situations like this, the body provides a voice as well as support. This pandemic will hopefully also give rise to a collective body that will be a platform for freelancers, gig workers, artists to enable them to come together and keep innovating and growing.
(The author is TABHRASA founder. The views expressed are her own and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them)
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Ahmad Muneeb elevated to VP – HR centre of excellence at Zepto
MUMBAI: Zepto has elevated Ahmad Muneeb to vice president – HR centre of excellence, placing him at the helm of the company’s total rewards, executive compensation and organisational effectiveness as the quick-commerce firm powers through a high-growth phase.
The move follows his stint as senior director of the HR COE, where he played a central role in preparing the company for IPO readiness while scaling its people analytics capabilities. During this period, Muneeb helped align complex performance management structures with more streamlined and scalable employee experience frameworks.
In his new role, he will steer the design of total rewards strategies, executive compensation planning and organisational design, while also overseeing performance management, employee experience initiatives and people analytics programmes.
Before joining Zepto, Muneeb spent nearly three years at Meesho, where he held multiple rewards and HR business partner roles. Earlier in his career, he worked as a senior rewards consultant at Mercer, advising high-tech clients on compensation benchmarking, pay structures and talent-focused reward frameworks.
He began his hr journey at Cognizant, where he supported compensation programmes for nearly two lakh employees across India and worked on m&a compensation alignment and skill-based pay initiatives. Prior to moving into HR, Muneeb started his career as a software engineer at Netcracker, bringing a technical grounding to his people strategy work.
With a mix of consulting rigour, start-up agility and enterprise-scale experience, Muneeb’s elevation signals Zepto’s continued focus on building robust people systems as it races towards its next phase of growth.
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Dell names Aishwarya Sudhakar director of marketing intelligence
INDIA: Dell Technologies is doubling down on artificial intelligence in marketing. The company has elevated Aishwarya Sudhakar to director of marketing measures and intelligence engineering, tasking her with building an enterprise-wide framework for AI-led measurement and customer intelligence.
In the role, Sudhakar will oversee unified data strategy, advanced modelling and context engineering: areas increasingly central to how large technology firms link marketing performance to business outcomes. Her remit includes shaping scalable systems that support Dell’s next phase of AI deployment across marketing functions.
Sudhakar steps into the position after holding a series of senior roles at Dell, including AI lead for marketing orchestration, senior manager, and senior data scientist in customer insights. Across these roles, she led global teams working on large-scale machine learning models, data pipelines and customer analytics.
Before joining Dell, she began her career at Tata Consultancy Services as a systems engineer and later founded Oclor, a shopping discovery start-up, where she built end-to-end technology platforms. The combination of enterprise-scale data work and entrepreneurial experience has shaped her focus on product-led, engineering-first innovation.
As technology companies seek sharper attribution and intelligence in an AI-saturated market, Dell’s move underscores the growing importance of marketing measurement as an engineering discipline rather than a reporting function.
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Gaurav Pathak returns to Adidas in key accounts leadership role
GURUGRAM: Adidas has appointed Gaurav Pathak as director of key and field accounts, bringing back an executive who began his leadership career at the company.
In the role, Pathak will be responsible for deepening strategic partnerships and expanding key, field and export accounts, with a mandate to accelerate growth across the Indian market. The appointment marks a return to Adidas after nearly a decade across premium retail and footwear brands.
Pathak most recently served as head of retail and business development at Ecco, where he focused on partner-led growth, market risk mitigation and operational scale. Before that, he spent eight years at House of Anita Dongre Limited, rising to general manager and leading regional operations across western and southern India.
His earlier career includes a stint as regional sales manager for Karnataka at United Colors of Benetton India and a six-year run at Adidas, where he held sales leadership roles.
With competition intensifying in India’s lifestyle and footwear market, Pathak’s brief will centre on strengthening field execution while aligning large accounts with Adidas’s broader commercial priorities.
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