From Bollywood Red Carpets To U.S. Tech Launches: The Journey Of Dhvani Unadkat

Some careers are built on straight lines. Dhvani Unadkat's has been built on leaps. From the red carpets of Mumbai to the product strategy teams of U.S. tech companies, her journey has always centered on one idea: every launch deserves to feel like a premiere.

She began her career in Mumbai, where she worked in public relations and promotions for more than 40 films between 2013 and 2015. At Universal Communications, she was part of campaigns for Hollywood titles like X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Avengers: Age of Ultron, while also helping promote Bollywood blockbusters featuring stars such as Varun Dhawan, Ajay Devgn, and Amitabh Bachchan. Those years taught her how to generate anticipation, create cultural buzz, and bring audiences together around a single moment.

The work was intense. Film marketing in Mumbai operates at a particular velocity—tight budgets, tighter deadlines, and audiences who decide within the first weekend whether a release succeeds or disappears. Unadkat learned to read cultural signals, identify the emotional hooks that would resonate, and coordinate campaigns across traditional media, digital platforms, and on-ground activations simultaneously. It was a masterclass in resourcefulness.

When she moved to the United States in 2015, the industry changed—but the principle stayed the same. After earning a master's degree in Branding and Integrated Communications at the City University of New York, City College, she began applying her storytelling instincts to data-driven marketing roles. At Hunter, where she worked from 2017 to 2021, she specialized in analytics and campaign measurement. The transition wasn't seamless—there were moments when her unconventional background felt like a disadvantage rather than an asset. But over nearly four years, she built fluency in the tools and frameworks that define modern marketing: social listening platforms, API integrations, performance dashboards, data visualization.

At Edelman Data & Intelligence, where she served as Account Supervisor for Performance Intelligence from April 2021 to July 2022, she expanded into social listening and performance intelligence, connecting audience sentiment with brand strategy. She managed analytics strategies for clients across industries, building custom dashboards that turned raw data into actionable recommendations. The work required collaboration with cross-functional teams—influencer specialists, project managers, human intelligence analysts—all working to align campaigns with business objectives.

By the time she joined Amazon as Product Marketing Manager in 2022, Unadkat had spent years translating between worlds. She understood how to balance creative intuition with quantitative rigor, how to build narratives that worked across cultures, and how to identify the customer insights that others often overlooked. Working on go-to-market initiatives for targeting solutions at Amazon Ads, she focused on helping advertisers reach the right audiences—developing value propositions, crafting customer-focused narratives, and creating sales enablement materials.

One project involved launching audience solutions built using shopper behavior signals to provide advertisers with a comprehensive view of customer journeys both online and offline. The challenge wasn't just technical—it was narrative. How do you explain complex technology in a way that makes marketers feel the product was designed specifically for their needs? Unadkat approached it the way she once approached film releases: by identifying the story the audience was already telling themselves, then positioning the product as the natural next chapter.

Her expertise has been recognized beyond the companies she has served. She has judged international competitions including the Effie Awards, which recognize the most effective marketing campaigns globally, and the Global E-commerce and Digital Marketing Association (ECDMA) Awards. She contributes to the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), which oversees the Webby Awards. The invitation to these panels came from established industry bodies—the kind of recognition that signals credibility across markets.

She also holds memberships in the CMO Council and the AI Marketing Alliance, and serves as a mentor through the Advertising Research Foundation's Women in Analytics program. Through initiatives including her company's employee resource groups, she guides early-career professionals navigating their own unconventional paths. The mentorship matters to her—particularly for women of color in tech who may face similar moments of wondering whether their backgrounds belong in rooms where everyone else's resume follows a more traditional pattern.

By 2025, Unadkat had moved to PayPal, where she now serves as Lead, Product Growth. Across her roles at Amazon and PayPal, her Bollywood instincts never left—she continued to view launches as cultural moments, not just transactions. She approaches product marketing with the same principles that guided her film campaigns: understand what the audience cares about, identify the emotional core of the message, and create a sense of occasion around the launch.

The recognition extends to global stages. Unadkat has applied to speak at SXSW 2026, proposing a session titled "Bollywood to Tech: Treating Launches Like Blockbusters." The premise is straightforward—that the frameworks used to launch entertainment properties can inform how technology companies bring products to market. It's an idea that sounds intuitive only in retrospect. Before Unadkat's career demonstrated it, the connection between Bollywood PR and Silicon Valley product marketing wasn't obvious to anyone.

She's also developing original frameworks based on her cross-industry experience. The "Blockbuster GTM" methodology applies entertainment marketing principles to product launches, while her voice of customer discovery tools focus on a principle she's refined over years: don't stop at the first "why." True customer insight, according to Unadkat, comes from asking follow-up questions that push past surface-level responses to uncover the underlying motivations that drive behavior.

Looking across her career, the thread is clear. From designing city-wide promotions for film releases in Mumbai to evaluating cutting-edge digital campaigns in Europe, Unadkat's work has been about understanding audiences and shaping stories that connect. 

It is an unusual arc, but one that demonstrates how lessons from entertainment can inform technology. The film industry taught her that audiences don't adopt products—they adopt stories about what those products mean for their lives. The tech industry taught her how to validate those stories with data, test them with precision, and scale them across markets. The combination has made her effective in an industry that increasingly values marketers who can operate at the intersection of creativity and analytics.

For immigrant professionals, particularly women of color in U.S. tech, Unadkat's trajectory offers a different model. Not the story of someone who erased their background to fit in, but someone who leveraged it as competitive advantage. The path from Universal Communications in Mumbai to major U.S. tech companies wasn't linear, but that's precisely what made it valuable. In the end, the most successful launches, whether movies or products, make people feel they are part of something bigger—and that principle, Unadkat has discovered, works everywhere.