Rahul Chaudhuri named vice president – Revenue at Zee Live

GURUGRAM: Rahul Chaudhuri has joined Zee Entertainment as vice president, revenue, for Zee Live, bringing over two decades of brand partnerships and music-industry dealmaking to the company’s live entertainment and experiential business.

Chaudhuri’s job is to run national revenue strategy for Zee Live, chasing sponsorships and brand partnerships while widening the company’s roster of marquee events and intellectual property. It is familiar territory for a man who has spent his career at the intersection of music, brands and audiences.

He arrives from Tips Industries, where he spent over two years as senior general manager for brand partnerships in the north, overseeing brand integrations, IP creation, synchronisations and licensing, work that included stitching Shah Rukh Khan and a recreated Yeh Dil Deewana into Hyundai’s ICC T20 World Cup campaign. Sandwiched briefly in between was a nine-month stint as vice president, growth and solutions, at DViO Digital, where he dabbled in AI and Web3-driven marketing.

But the bulk of Chaudhuri’s reputation was built over nine and a half years at Sony Music, where he ran brand partnerships nationally, pairing artists with the likes of Micromax, Ray-Ban, Pepsi, Maruti Suzuki and Oppo, and engineering campaigns that fused Bollywood and pop tracks with brands from Zomato to PUBG. Before that, his path ran through event management and sponsorship sales at Showhouse Event Management, Fountainhead Promotions, Network18, Fever 104 FM and Sony BMG, with an early stretch at Sports Media Limited selling sponsorships for the likes of the Rolling Stones and international cricket boards.

That is a resume built almost entirely on turning music and entertainment into revenue, precisely the instinct Zee Live is banking on as it scales up its live events business.

From cricket grounds and radio waves to concert stages and now Zee’s live entertainment arm, Chaudhuri has spent 20-odd years proving that the right song, at the right moment, can sell almost anything. Zee Live is betting he still has a few hits left in him.