Ambarish Bandyopadhyay, the Executive Director – Sales Head of Star’s entertainment channel, Star Plus, has been reportedly appointed as the new National Sales Head of Star Sports.
Bandyopadhyay has replaced Anup Govindan, who quit Star from the position of Revenue Head earlier this year in July to join Viacom18‘s sports network as the Chief Revenue Officer, as per reports.Â
Moving ahead with its policy of hiring from within rather than looking outside, Disney conducted several internal interviews and determined Ambarish as the National Sales Head of Star Sports with immediate effect. In the interim, Shubhra Saraf took over the role, who has been with the network for over five years as the Product and Revenue Strategy Head.
Bandyopadhyay has a hefty work experience, he started as Area Sales Manager with Dabur India Limited and was later appointed as the Territory Development Manager in January 2004.
After staying with Hindustan Unilever Ltd for 10 years and four months, he left the company as National Sales Head, Modern Trade in 2014.
Ambarish had a work stint with HT Media Ltd for four years and moved on from the company in 2018 when he was the Chief Operating Officer.
Before getting promoted, Bandyopadhyay was the Sales Head of Star Plus for four years. Ambarish did his Bachelor of Engineering from Jadav University (1994-98) and later did his post-graduation from the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad.
With the Asia Cup 2022 going on, Ambarish’s immediate job as the National Sales Head will be to focus on the upcoming home bilateral series against Australia and South Africa along with the much-awaited ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2022.
The upcoming T20 World Cup in Australia will be a massive opportunity for the network, which has witnessed an underwhelming response from the new-age digital companies due to the global macro slowdown in funding. This event isn’t just important for the sports network but Disney Star as a whole considering the Ad sales revenue expectation of over 1000 crore in the month-long event.
Disney Star is also conducting interviews inside the organization to fill the other vacant positions.
Last year, Anil Jayaraj left Star Sports to join Viacom18 as CEO-Sports and Gulshan Verma from Disney+ Hotstar also left the company to join JioAds as CEO.
Earlier this year, Atul Gandhi, Executive Director – Advertising Sales of Star Sports also reportedly left to join Viacom18.