Executive Dossier

“On TV, pace is everything” : Shobhaa De

Published

23 years ago

February 11, 2003

Shobhaa De has perfected the art of reinventing herself – as a model, journalist, advertising copy writer, celebrity columnist, novelist and now as a television script writer. She has several novels to her credit and has taken the favourable reviews as well as criticism in her stride.

For Zee’s Kittie Party, De’s incisive pen has created eight women who are catty, full of gossip, often hypocritical and crafty. What sets these well-heeled women apart from their counterparts in competing serials is their closer association with reality. De has sensitively brought out their honesty even as she brutally exposes their frailties, their obsession with class and their weakness for the rich life.

De spoke to indiantelevision.com’s Ashwin Kotian on the occasion of the Siddhant Cinevision bash to celebrate the completion of 100 episodes of Kittie Party. Excerpts-

What kind of adjustments does a writer have to make in order to write for TV serials?
On TV, pace is everything. If you don’t understand pace, you don’t have any business to be on television. A writer’s work cannot be compartmentalised. Whether it is an ad copy or a script or a novel, it is inspired creativity at its best. It is all about thoughts, words and ideas.

Writing for TV serials was an exciting experience for me. Unlike a novel, which is purely a one-on-one experience; writing for a TV serial took me to another dimension. I felt as if my characters were coming alive on the small screen. My characters have faces (of the actors who played the characters) and I associate these faces with my creations.

How have people reacted to Kittie Party?
Kittie Party was a gut reaction to the ‘retrograde’ serials currently on air. I grabbed the opportunity to use Kittie Party as a device to project contemporary women and narrate a true to life story. The serial wouldn’t have been accepted a decade back as it would have been considered to be an elitist past time.

I have been surprised by the response from people in different walks of life. This proves that the premise of female bonding and women meeting one another to discuss their lives is being accepted in several places in the country. In fact, even within Mumbai, there are suburban kitty parties, multi-millionaire kitty parties and middle-class kitty parties.

People have reacted in a favourable manner and this response has come from metros as well as smaller towns such as Indore, Nagpur and Coimbatore. These people who reside in small towns didn’t know me as an author of English novels. Now they have started reading my work. Writing for Kittie Party and the promotional media blitz around the serial has succeeded in getting me instant recognition beyond the metros. There has been a rub-off effect on the sales of my novels but the extent cannot be quantified.

Even at airports, I have had women walking up to me and congratulating me and thanking me for giving them Kittie Party.

“People have reacted in a favourable manner and this response has come from metros as well as smaller towns such as Indore, Nagpur and Coimbatore“

How has Kittie Party broken the ‘saas-bahu’ mould on Indian television?
It is all about the attitude projected by the women protagonists. Kittie Party has definitely broken the mould and presented Indian women of the 21st century. It has brought these women to the fore and given them confidence to behave freely – as their global counterparts do.

The story is about issues relevant to today’s women and not the ‘saas-bahu’ sagas where the protagonists’ mindsets were 50 years behind the times. I personally feel that the ‘saas-bahu’ themes are extremely insulting and degrading. It is wrong to project women as submissive on the small screen. On the other hand, one must give the younger generation enough confidence to be what they are and what they want to do.

Why are the ‘saas-bahu’ sagas on TV still watched by millions of women?
Indian women love to cling on to the existing stratosphere as they find a certain comfort zone. Most Indian women have spent their entire lifetime living and believing in the values projected on screen. Several of them haven’t had the courage to break away from the groove. Also, the elder generation of women don’t allow the younger ones to break the mould.

Kittie Party has given them a new insight. Viewers may or may not pick these insights and imbibe them. But the fact remains that we have shown them a new path. The female characters speak today’s language and many Indian women will definitely connect to them.

“Indian women love to cling on to the existing stratosphere as they find a certain comfort zone”

Are your male characters sidelined amidst the numerous female characters?
Some male characters in Kittie Party are extremely progressive modern males. Consider the character of Manoviraj (played by actor Kiran Kumar) – he is a contemporary man who doesn’t fall into the trap of stifling his women. He gives them freedom. Basically, all my characters are neither black nor white; they all have their failings and their strengths; they are good at times and equally bad. None of them can be permanently slotted or typecast in a permanent mould.

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Executive Dossier

Game on, fame on as Good Game hunts India’s first global gaming star

Published

1 month ago

January 27, 2026

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Game faces on, pressure high India’s gaming ambitions are levelling up. Good Game, billed as the world’s first as-live global gaming reality show, has officially launched in India with a bold mission: to crown the country’s first Global Gaming Superstar.

Blending esports with mainstream entertainment, the show brings together competitive gaming, creativity and on-camera performance in a format that tests more than just joystick skills. Contestants will be judged on gameplay, screen presence and their ability to perform under pressure, reflecting how gaming has evolved from pastime to profession and pop culture currency.

Fronting the show are three high-profile ambassadors: actor and entrepreneur Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Indian cricket star Rishabh Pant, and gaming creator Ujjwal Chaurasia. The winner will take home Rs 1 crore ($100,000) among the largest prize pools for any Indian reality show along with the chance to represent India on a global stage.

Backed by a planned annual investment of up to Rs 100 crore, Good Game is also courting brand partners, promising a minimum reach of 500 million among India’s core youth audience. The creators position the show as a bridge between entertainment and interactive culture, offering long-format content, community engagement and commercial scale.

Auditions are now open to Indian citizens aged 18 and above, inviting amateur and professional gamers, creators and performers alike. Shortlisted candidates will be called for in-person auditions in Mumbai on 14 and 15 February, and in Delhi on 28 February and 1 March 2026.

With big money, big names and even bigger ambition, Good Game signals a shift in how India views gaming not just as play, but as performance, profession and prime-time spectacle.

Digital

SpotDraft hires new CMO and CFO to fuel global push for its AI contract platform

Published

3 months ago

December 3, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

INDIA: SpotDraft has strengthened its senior ranks as it gears up for faster global expansion, naming Alon Waks as chief marketing officer and Amit Sharma as chief financial officer. The appointments follow the firm’s $54 million Series B round earlier this year and mark a push to scale across the Americas, EMEA and India.

The AI-powered contract-lifecycle-management platform has posted 100 per cent year-on-year growth in customer acquisition, counting Apollo.io, IPSY, Mixpanel, Oyster and Panasonic among its global clients. The firm processes more than one million contracts annually, with volumes up 173 per cent and nearly 50,000 monthly active users.

Waks, a veteran of Kustomer, Bizzabo, CreatorIQ, LivePerson and ZoomInfo, will steer global marketing and category positioning as legal teams adopt AI-driven tools. Sharma, who has led finance across scaling tech firms since 2016, will guide financial strategy, investor relations and market expansion.

Both hires aim to sharpen SpotDraft’s bid for a larger slice of the fast-growing legal-tech market, expected to exceed $63 billion by 2032. Co-founder and chief executive Shashank Bijapur said the company is focused on scaling go-to-market operations in the Americas, deepening leadership in EMEA, and accelerating AI capabilities for general counsels and legal-operations leaders.

Clients report shorter deal cycles and better alignment between legal and business teams. “What used to take weeks now happens in days,” said Abnormal Security senior legal operations manager Susan Koenig. DeepL head of legal operations André Barrow, said SpotDraft has helped reframe legal “from a cost centre to a generator of revenue”.

Executive Dossier

Outdoor Ads Get Smarter as LOC8 Shifts OOH from Visibility to Attention

Published

3 months ago

November 28, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Out-of-home ads were once the wallflowers of marketing seen by everyone, noticed by few. But in an age where attention has become the world’s most fought-over currency, even billboards are getting a brain upgrade. Enter LOC8, OSMO’s AI-powered attention engine, quietly reshaping the old OOH playbook by measuring not just who could have looked at an ad, but who actually did. The shift is subtle but seismic: impressions are out, impact is in and data, not gut instinct, is calling the shots.

In a landscape where marketers question every rupee spent outdoors, LOC8 is turning lampposts, flyovers and traffic islands into precision-mapped attention laboratories. By crunching dwell time, visibility zones, perceptual size and real-world obstructions, the platform is dragging OOH into a future where creativity meets computer vision and where the best ideas aren’t just eye-catching, but eye-measured. From automotive facelifts to FMCG novelty and real estate trust-building, the message is clear, outdoor has stopped shouting and started listening. Indian Television Dot Com explores more about it in an Interview interview with OSMO co-founder Nipun Arora.

On how OSMO is shifting outdoor advertising from a visibility-led medium to an attention-led one through LOC8.

Traditional OOH has long been measured by visibility and impressions i.e how many people could see an ad. OSMO, through its proprietary AI platform LOC8, is shifting that narrative more towards likelihood of being noticed. Using computer vision and machine learning, LOC8 analyzes real-world video data to measure visibility zones, obstructions, dwell time and perceptual size; bringing precision to how attention is quantified outdoors. It moves the focus from mere impressions to quality of impressions, making OOH a data-verified, attention-led medium comparable to digital in accountability.

On how marketers can use LOC8’s dwell-time, visibility and perception insights to craft more effective, emotionally resonant OOH campaigns.

LOC8 helps brands understand how people truly experience outdoor media how long they look, from what distance, and under what conditions. By quantifying dwell time, visibility duration, and perceptual size; marketers can plan campaigns that align with real human viewing behavior. This empowers creative and strategy teams to design emotionally resonant storytelling where messaging, visual hierarchy and placement are optimized for how people actually notice and process OOH creatives.

About what LOC8 has revealed through campaigns like Renault Triber and Namaste India on how categories such as auto, FMCG and real estate use attention metrics to drive outcomes.

Each category uses attention data differently but all share one common goal: to convert outdoor visibility into measurable engagement.

• Automotive | Renault Triber

For the new Renault Triber facelift, bold creative met data-led planning through LOC8. By analyzing on-ground video data, LOC8 measured real audience attention across placements factoring in visibility zones, obstructions, traffic speed and perceptual size. This enabled Renault to identify corridors that delivered maximum reach, saliency and engagement, optimizing media efficiency and ROI.

• FMCG | Namaste India

In OOH, innovation is the hook and assets are the bait. But bait often hides the hook. With Loc8’s attention metrics, we ensured the bait wasn’t a hurdle, rather it became the perfect stage for innovation to deliver its full impact! The insight proved that creative novelty, when validated by attention data, drives deeper engagement and measurable brand lift.

• Real Estate

For luxury and real estate campaigns targeting HNI/UHNI audiences, attention patterns differ especially between front and rear passengers, who are often the core audience segment for premium sites. LOC8’s ability to distinguish rear vs. front visibility plays a critical role here. It helps identify sites that offer longer viewing windows and stronger perceptual dominance from the rear seat where decision-makers are most likely seated making it a key differentiator for premium and trust-led categories. Together, these insights prove that auto optimizes for impact, FMCG for recall, and real estate for trust visibility showing how attention metrics adapt to category goals while ensuring measurable outcomes.

On how attention analytics will shape the future of brand storytelling and media planning as OOH becomes more digitised and data-driven.

As outdoor digitizes, attention analytics will inform not just where to advertise but how stories are told in public spaces. This evolution transforms OOH from a static broadcast channel into a dynamic attention ecosystem, where creativity is optimized through evidence-based insight.

On how LOC8’s data-led framework helps marketers quantify OOH impact and make outdoor a more accountable, ROI-driven medium.

LOC8 bridges the gap between intuition and evidence. By quantifying metrics like visibility duration, attention opportunity index, and visual saliency rank, it allows brands to benchmark site performance and justify investment. This data-led approach brings transparency, comparability and ROI measurement to a medium historically driven by perception.

On how OSMO ensures AI and computer vision enhance creativity rather than reduce it to numbers.

OSMO believes that technology should enhance creativity, not overshadow it. LOC8’s attention models reveal what naturally draws the human eye helping creative teams refine design cues, contrast, and visual hierarchy for greater impact. By merging art and science, LOC8 empowers creativity with intelligence.

About the creative best practices and design cues LOC8 has uncovered regarding what truly captures consumer attention outdoors.

LOC8’s visual cognition analysis has surfaced clear patterns across campaigns:

• High contrast and minimal messaging outperform cluttered designs.

• Motion cues draw significantly longer dwell times.

• The first two seconds are critical, creatives must establish focus instantly.

• Contextual alignment between the creative and its environment increases attention by over 30%.

These learnings offer a scientific foundation for creative effectiveness helping brands design OOH that’s visually magnetic and emotionally memorable.

On how attention metrics will integrate into omnichannel planning where OOH, digital and social work together for unified brand impact.

Attention can become the unifying KPI across OOH, digital and social to creates seamless storytelling continuity, where outdoor triggers digital engagement. The future of omnichannel planning lies in attention-led integration ensuring that campaigns don’t just reach audiences everywhere but truly capture and hold their focus.