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Gaurav Gandhi of Amazon Prime: On the watchlist
Summary
The vice-president of Amazon Prime Video, Asia-Pacific & Middle East-North Africa, on the large headroom for growth, on being meaningful enough to be commercially viable, and his love for sneakers
Life has come full circle for Gaurav Gandhi, vice-president of Amazon Prime Video, Asia-Pacific & Middle East-North Africa. Gandhi grew up in the 1980s watching his father, an export-import agent for several companies in Europe, travel the world. He would return laden with gifts (sneakers, in particular) for Gandhi. But Gandhi, a geography nerd who was into collecting stamps and coins, was far more interested in his father’s stories—of where he’d gone and the kind of people he’d met. Today, as Gandhi straddles content and business operations at one of the biggest global streaming platforms, he gets to see enough of the world himself.
“I do spend a lot of time travelling, which is both good and bad...Good because it allows you a real exposure to customers and teams across the world, and bad because it can take a toll on you since you’re spending so much time away from family. But then, it is all tied to my early days, when I used to dream of travelling the world," says Gandhi, 48, who has just moved back to Mumbai from Singapore, where he was based for a little over a year in his new role. He’s in Delhi for a quick visit and we meet at the Taj Mansingh on a warm Monday morning.
At Amazon, everything needs a document and it is common for people to spend the first 30 minutes of a meeting reading details of the agenda so that they can all be on the same page (both literally and figuratively), Gandhi tells me. That’s why he has also made notes for our meeting—to help jog his memory since we’re going back nearly 25 years.
Born and brought up in a joint family in Ghaziabad, Gandhi grew up keenly interested in content and music. His childhood version of on-demand entertainment was playing videos of his favourite songs by bands like Guns N’ Roses and Pink Floyd pre-recorded on VHS tapes on TV as those on air were not to his liking.
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By the third year at Khalsa College in Delhi University, Gandhi knew he wanted to be in marketing and advertising (unsurprising since he sat through all TV ads through his childhood), and while the aim was to get into an IIM (Indian Institute of Management), he eventually enrolled at the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai. He landed his first job not in advertising or marketing, but in media planning at communications agency Madison World under founder, chairman and managing director Sam Balsara, a job that laid the ground for his career in media and entertainment.
“One thing I learnt over these instances is that intentionality is good, but adaptability is even better. A lot of things make sense in hindsight," Gandhi says, sipping on his Diet Coke.
Having moved to Delhi for the Madison job in 1998, Gandhi soon found his way back to Mumbai again, thanks to a research and planning role at media and TV conglomerate Turner International India and his long-time girlfriend (now wife) who wanted to stay in the financial capital, having landed a plum advertising job herself.
The transition from broadcast television to the newly emerging category of video streaming came some years later. By 2010, Gandhi was working with Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd, a new entrant to the Indian media and entertainment space at the time, in various roles. He was then asked to spearhead the launch of the company’s OTT platform Voot by Sudhanshu Vats, then CEO of Viacom18.
This was still a couple of months ahead of Netflix’s India launch and Prime Video too was yet to start operating in the country. The only big player to have taken the plunge was Disney+ Hotstar (then Hotstar) with some enterprising production houses such as Yash Raj Films backing YouTube originals. India was yet to discover OTT or the concept of binge-watching, at least via legitimate means.
“This was July 2015 and Vats said we should try to launch by March 2016. I had no idea but said we could try," Gandhi says smiling.
“It was hard. We had to figure content, product, hire teams from scratch. I had to think of every single element, from building the UI (user interface), business metrics to original content strategy. We didn’t have sports but our reality shows had potential, so we had to think of 24x7 experiences to build around titles like Bigg Boss, besides digital sales because it was an ad-supported platform. Those one or two years made for the steepest learning curve of my life where I had to not just unlearn stuff but harness everything I had learnt until then," Gandhi says.
Unlike programmes tailored for appointment viewing on TV, OTT platforms like Voot had to come up with original long-format series that audiences would choose to make time for, and possibly speak to a younger demographic. Further, while broadcast television was an established format, advertisers were yet to figure if they would make any returns from digital video.
With Voot having scraped through to manage a test launch by end-March 2016, it wasn’t long before the OTT ecosystem in India started seeing wide investments by foreign players. Netflix, which launched in India in January 2016, brought out Sacred Games, one of the first Indian shows to make waves, followed by Inside Edge and Breathe on Prime Video, that launched in December that year.
“When the Amazon job came, the SVoD (subscription video-on-demand) category wasn’t big in India. Video consumption was high but it was mostly ad-supported, so it was an interesting opportunity to build and grow the service while building the category itself," Gandhi says. The first thing thereafter was to get into white spaces—Indians were used to watching TV content for free so services like Prime Video had to rely on high-quality long-form original content or films that could be available online with shortened windows after their theatrical release.
“India loves its movies but limitations of geography or supply constraints (in smaller centres) often act as barriers in the distribution of content pan-India. Plus, theatres are few in number so a lot of movies do not get released. We decided to go national and expand the linguistic palate," Gandhi says referring to the platform’s wide acquisition of theatrical movies across languages like Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and others. Prime Video built on the strategy further during the pandemic when it decided to premiere films directly on the platform, bypassing cinemas, which were anyway shut. This included titles such as Shershaah, Gulabo Sitabo, Coolie No.1, which coupled with originals such as Mirzapur, The Family Man, Panchayat and others, have positioned it as a player deeply invested in India.
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The explosion in streaming video fuelled by the covid-19 pandemic has cooled down as new entertainment options open up and OTT subscriptions plateau in urban centres, their main market. The total audience for OTT platforms rose 13.5% to reach 481.1 million in 2023 from 423.8 million in 2022, against a 20% surge seen in the previous year, according to media consulting firm Ormax. Streaming apps have now reached 34% of India’s population of 1.4 billion. Video-on-demand platforms across the industry, which began scaling back investments in 2022 following rising global pressure on their parent companies and sluggish subscriber growth, remained cautious in 2023 as well.
However, Gandhi emphasises the potential for growth. “One can look at this in two ways—one perspective is that the category is eight years old in India. On the other hand, the category is just eight years old and the headroom for growth is large in this country. The number one thing is to chase great stories and deliver them to customers, and we’re just getting started with this. Consider the number of people who watch pay TV or have access to mobile phones and the reality is—it’s still early days," says Gandhi.
The industry remains at a category creation stage, he adds, where it can try different models and double down on what works or rework what could be better. Unlike broadcast television, OTT is about segmentation, he says, where you have to be meaningful enough to a certain number of people to be commercially viable.
The other big lesson learnt over the years has been to lead by influence. While there will be teams hierarchically under you, it matters far more if you can influence those who don’t report to you or whom you don’t necessarily have authority over, Gandhi believes.
“The best leaders are those who create more leaders and tap into potential, not just performance, through markers like curiosity, high judgment and the ability to join the dots and triangulate well. It is also important to create a positive environment and happy teams with a common purpose. That is not a benefit you can quantify but constant communication with your team will instinctively help you see opportunities and problems far better than periodic reviews," he says.
Gandhi, who continues to remain a music aficionado, loves bands such as U2, Coldplay, Dire Straits and Imagine Dragons. He says he, his wife and their two girls—one of whom is now ready for college—are all deeply passionate about music and travel frequently for concerts abroad. The other big love is for sneakers and while he doesn’t mention how many he owns, he tells me there are separate collections for work, parties and so on—essentially enough to annoy his wife.
Referring to family as his core inspiration, Gandhi says betting on oneself is the biggest investment one can make. “Don’t be afraid of the fact that you don’t know something, that’s not a problem at all. You can figure that out, and don’t be afraid of failure. If you zoom out and look at the big picture, you will see that failures at one point don’t matter at all eventually. The race is long and it’s only with yourself."
