When India’s entertainment landscape rushed toward video-first experiences, Malvika Sujan was looking elsewhere. She was paying attention to behaviour…what people did when they weren’t on screens, how they consumed stories in the in-between spaces of their lives, and why attention was becoming a premium currency.
That instinct would eventually place her at the centre of one of the fastest-growing audio entertainment ecosystems.
Today, as Associate Director of Strategic Partnerships at Pocket FM, Malvika plays a central role in shaping how brands, platforms, and new-age consumers intersect. But her journey into audio began long before the industry’s current momentum. It began with curiosity, patience, and an ability to recognise shifts before they took shape.
An Intuitive Career Pivot
Before joining Pocket FM, Malvika was working with a major event ticketing platform, something that is defined by frequency, instant gratification, and constant movement. Even there, she found herself drawn more to long-term behavioural patterns than to surface-level transactions.
While exploring emerging sectors, she stumbled upon the early world of audio storytelling. It wasn’t a glamorous space then. It wasn’t even fully understood. But it was intriguing and full of possibilities.
A Career Shaped by Patience and Perspective
Her approach to partnerships is rooted in alignment. It requires spending as much time with product and engineering teams as with external partners. It involves translating market shifts into opportunities and recognising that growth often emerges from channels that didn’t exist a year earlier.
Before Pocket FM, Malvika worked across some of India’s most influential media and digital organisations, including The Times of India, Paytm Insider, and ThePrint. Each role strengthened her intuition that partnerships succeed not through speed, but through timing, context, and relationships built steadily over years.
Her exploration of new sectors was guided by an interest in long-term consumer behaviour. Audio storytelling, then still a fledgling category in India, felt inevitable. Her early conversations with Pocket FM confirmed that intuition. Audio was just carving out its own, more intimate space.
Redefining Partnerships for an Audio-First World
At Pocket FM, Malvika leads strategic partnerships with a blend of product insight, listener psychology, and ecosystem understanding. Her work extends into shaping how partnerships can deepen user journeys and create new avenues for discovery.
She views partnerships and collaborations as extensions of the listening experience. Audience alignment sits at the core of her decisions because audio thrives on relevance and routine. A successful partnership, in her view, respects the listener’s time and integrates seamlessly into existing habits.
The early years brought their own challenges. Audio series were unfamiliar to many stakeholders, and video dominated the entertainment mindshare. Malvika approached these conversations with patience. Instead of selling the idea of audio, she showed evidence: hours spent on stories, character-driven loyalty, and the comfort of a format that doesn’t demand a screen.
Gradually, perceptions shifted. Brands began recognising audio series as a category with its own emotional and functional strengths.
A Partnership That Captured a Cultural Moment
Among her many collaborations, the Shaktimaan Returns launch remains particularly meaningful. The partnership brought India’s beloved 90s superhero into contemporary consumer life through a simple, thoughtful execution. Zepto riders dressed as Shaktimaan, and a flying superhero icon delivering orders on the app, sparked a wave of nostalgia across generations.
It wasn’t loud or gimmicky. It was immersive in a way only well-crafted partnerships can be. For Malvika, it reinforced her belief that collaborations should create moments.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Audio
As India’s audio entertainment landscape matures, Malvika sees long-form episodic storytelling becoming a cultural habit rather than a niche interest. Listeners are investing emotionally in fictional universes, and regional storytelling is accelerating the category’s growth. With AI shaping personalisation and discovery, she believes the future will demand partnerships that are deeper, more integrated, and more attuned to everyday life.
The next phase of audio, she says, will be defined by how seamlessly storytelling fits into the rhythms of a multitasking nation.
Learning From Both Classroom and Career
Her education at Welingkar Institute offered her grounding in business fundamentals, strategic thinking, and organisational structures. But she often acknowledges that real refinement came from the field, from mentors, from experimentation, and from roles that required her to build frameworks rather than inherit them.
If there is a thread that runs through Malvika Sujan’s career, it is her belief that partnerships grow through clarity and trust. In a sector evolving as rapidly as audio entertainment, her measured approach stands out. She is shaping the environment that allows them to become meaningful and long-lasting.
Her journey reflects a combination of intuition, discipline, and perspective that will continue guiding her as the audio entertainment landscape expands, both in India and globally.
