Zee Entertainment appoints Vipul Bandekar as Z Sports marketing director

MUMBAI: Vipul Bandekar is taking his sports marketing playbook into a new arena. Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited has appointed Bandekar as director of marketing for Z Sports, bringing a career spanning more than a decade across Star Sports, Disney Star and JioStar to the company’s efforts to build its sports brand and deepen engagement with fans.

Bandekar announced the appointment on LinkedIn in October 2026, describing it as a new chapter focused on strengthening Z Sports, growing audiences and creating connections between sporting properties, brands and fans. His remit includes developing marketing campaigns, building fan experiences and supporting the evolution of Z Sports as Zee works towards shaping a broader sports ecosystem.

The appointment follows a year in which Bandekar briefly stepped into entrepreneurship after leaving JioStar in December 2025. From January to October 2026, he founded Gravitas Media, a brand and integrated marketing consultancy that worked with businesses across fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), alcoholic beverages, entertainment and films, real estate and direct-to-consumer wellness.

Before that, Bandekar spent four years and five months at JioStar as assistant vice-president of brand strategy and integrated marketing, from August 2021 to December 2025. He led marketing across a portfolio that included the Indian Premier League (IPL), International Cricket Council (ICC) events, Pro Kabaddi League (PKL), Women’s Premier League (WPL), Indian Super League (ISL) and bilateral cricket. His responsibilities included an annual marketing profit and loss portfolio of more than Rs 350 crore.

Among his major assignments was a revamp of IPL audience strategy, which segmented 1.4 billion Indians into six viewing cohorts, each with a distinct need, message and channel mix. The strategy was adapted for IPL 2025, with a fan- and platform-led marketing plan supporting the JioHotstar launch.

IPL 2025 recorded 338 million average monthly active users, up 37 per cent year on year, and peak concurrency of 55.2 million. On television, the tournament’s opening day registered a TV rating (TVR) of 7.4, 27 per cent above target. The previous IPL 2023 season had also delivered a 33 per cent year-on-year increase in ratings and a 21 per cent rise in per-match reach.

Bandekar’s JioStar tenure also included work on the Champions Trophy 2025. The India-Pakistan match recorded a TVR of 10.0 against a target of 6.2, while its reach reached 320 million, exceeding the target of 250 million.

In kabaddi, Bandekar repositioned Pro Kabaddi League around core regional fan families. Season 9 recorded 66 million viewers for its playoffs, an increase of 32 per cent, while reach rose from 189 million to 222 million. The playoffs were the league’s highest-rated since Season 6.

He also developed fan-facing platforms and activations, including Star Nahi Far, a fan-meets-star initiative across more than 10 cities that generated approximately Rs 30 crore in earned media at a cost per thousand impressions of Rs 17. Other initiatives included We for Virat, Har School Mein Kabaddi, which covered more than 500 schools, and trophy tours featuring Suresh Raina, Kane Williamson and Rishabh Pant.

His campaigns also explored interactive marketing formats. A dynamic augmented reality filter created for IPL in partnership with Meta recorded a click-through rate of 9 per cent, compared with a benchmark of 1 to 3 per cent, and was subsequently featured as a Meta case study. A live moment-marketing video initiative delivered a click-through rate 10 times higher than the comparison benchmark cited in his profile.

Bandekar’s experience with Star Sports dates back to June 2014, when he joined as assistant manager of marketing. He was part of the core team that launched Pro Kabaddi League and ISL, helping establish the leagues’ marketing platforms and build awareness beyond cricket.

For Pro Kabaddi League’s inaugural season, he developed the “Building Rivalry, Building Heroes” player-storytelling platform, which generated 149 million reach and more than 2.8 billion social impressions. The campaign work also included content partnerships with news channels and radio studio coverage around the launch, semi-finals and final.

As the league expanded, Bandekar worked on campaigns that helped take Pro Kabaddi into markets including Rajasthan, Delhi and Punjab-Haryana. Season 5 opened to 50 million viewers, while its final recorded a TVR of 3.4, ranking among the highest-rated non-cricket events at the time. The 2016 Kabaddi World Cup final registered a rating of 2.3, second only to cricket, and attracted 36 per cent more viewers sampling the event than Pro Kabaddi League Season 4.

His football marketing experience included a regional strategy for ISL that increased viewership by 78 per cent in West Bengal and 66 per cent in Assam. A campaign built around the Mohun Bagan-East Bengal rivalry on radio helped deliver Bengal’s highest-rated league-stage match, with a TVR of 6.6.

At Star Sports, Bandekar also worked on IPL campaigns, bilateral cricket, channel launches and digital planning across sports. IPL 2019 recorded an opening-weekend reach of 219 million and opening-day reach of 133 million, compared with 106 million in 2018. The campaign also brought back 43 per cent of viewers who had lapsed from IPL 2018.

During the Covid-disrupted IPL 2020 season, the opening game registered a TVR of 10.4, up 30 per cent year on year. Reach stood at 160 million against a target of 150 million, while awareness of the revised match timing reached 91 per cent. For IPL 2018, Star Sports’ first season as broadcaster, the marketing plan delivered a TVR of 5.3 against a target of 5.0, with ratings increasing 28 per cent nationally and 56 per cent in Tamil Nadu.

Bandekar’s earlier work also extended to the Rio 2016 Olympics, which reached 138 million viewers on Star Sports, and the India-England pink-ball Test in 2021, for which a 360-degree Gujarat campaign delivered the highest-rated Test since 2015. His portfolio included the launch of Star Sports’ Telugu and Kannada channels, as well as partnerships involving Google, Swiggy and Josh.

Before joining Star Sports, Bandekar worked at Mindshare from April 2011 to May 2014, managing a communication portfolio worth more than Rs 100 crore for Hindustan Unilever’s laundry brands, including Surf Excel, Rin, Comfort, Sunlight, Wheel and Magic. His work included consumer-led regional campaigns, such as a Sunlight initiative around Durga Puja and an 11-city Onam Pookalam contest in Kerala.

He began his career at Network Advertising in November 2009, working on integrated campaigns across television, print and radio for clients including Cipla i-pill, Corelle, HDFC Mutual Fund and Gowardhan.

His entrepreneurial stint at Gravitas Media added another dimension to his marketing experience. The consultancy advised brands on positioning, go-to-market strategies, integrated campaigns and budget planning. It also developed Orbit, a campaign-intelligence product for creator and influencer marketing that tracked activity across YouTube, Instagram, X, Telegram and Snapchat.

Orbit was designed to bring creator discovery, brand-fit checks, campaign planning, live tracking and reporting into one view. It distinguished between measured, modelled and creator-reported figures, and included creator rankings by cost per view, brand-safety scoring and Hinglish-aware comment analysis designed to identify purchase intent.

Bandekar’s move to Zee brings together experience across broadcast television, streaming, regional sports audiences and creator-led marketing. At Z Sports, the challenge will be to translate that experience into a distinct brand identity and build stronger connections between sporting properties, commercial partners and fans.

With a portfolio spanning cricket’s biggest fixtures, kabaddi’s regional following and football’s local rivalries, Bandekar’s next innings will centre on how Z Sports positions itself in India’s competitive sports media landscape. The task is not simply to market events, but to build an ecosystem that gives fans more reasons to engage and brands more opportunities to participate.