Manager - Programming Strategy Research, Star Maa

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end research engine for Star Maa, translating millions of data points into the stories that decide what 75 million Telugu-speaking viewers watch every night. You will design, commission, and synthesize qualitative focus groups, quantitative surveys, ethnographic immersions, and social-listening studies to uncover why a grandmother in Vijayawada stays loyal to a daily soap while her granddaughter binge-watches the same franchise on JioHotstar.
• • Own the weekly BARC ratings war-room: build predictive models that forecast Star Maa and Zee Telugu ratings 7 days in advance, flag early warning signals, and recommend slot-swaps, promo bursts, or story tweaks before competitors even see the dip. Your deck will be the first document the Programming Head opens every Monday morning.
• • Translate raw numbers into emotionally resonant narratives. You will craft story-universe bibles for new fiction and non-fiction properties—complete with character archetypes, cultural tension points, and audience empathy maps—so that writers, directors, and marketing teams march to the same creative drumbeat from day one.
• • Be the bridge between Marketing and Creative. Distil positioning insights into razor-sharp creative briefs that specify tone, visual grammar, tagline territories, and media-channel nuances. Sit in edit-room reviews to ensure the final promo delivers the insight you unearthed, not the cliché the editor assumed.
• • Expand and curate a best-in-class research agency ecosystem across Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Negotiate scopes, audit methodologies, pilot AI-enabled tools, and maintain a bench of boutique partners who can parachute in when a last-minute celebrity controversy changes viewer sentiment overnight.
• • Leverage AI (ChatGPT, Claude, or internal LLMs) to automate recurring reports, simulate audience reactions to hypothetical plot twists, and surface emergent meme trends 48 hours before they peak. Your goal: spend less time cutting crosstabs and more time crafting the strategic "so what".
• • Present to the C-suite every fortnight. Distil 200-slide decks into 3 killer insights that decide whether a prime-time show gets a 6-week extension or a Friday finale. Expect tough questions; deliver crisp answers backed by data, culture, and gut instinct honed by 5 years in the trenches.
• • Champion a culture of curiosity across the organization. Run monthly "Insight Jams" where social-listening analysts, promo producers, and scriptwriters co-create hypotheses, test them in mini-panels overnight, and iterate before the next script meeting. Your success metric: decisions that used to take 3 weeks now happen in 3 days.
• • Navigate ambiguity with grace. When a sudden political event or viral TikTok trend upends viewer mood, you will re-field a dipstick study the same evening, model likely rating impact by midnight, and brief the network head at 8 a.m.—all while keeping external vendors, internal creatives, and finance aligned.