Rubeena Singh has been serving as Managing Director at NP Digital India. She has over two decades of experience across digital, print and broadcast media. Singh started her professional journey at Star TV and spent a large part of her career at Nework18 where she spearheaded the launch of CNBC Awaaz, Forbes India and Moneycontrol.
As COO of Moneycontrol, she led operations and P&L. She later became CEO of iProspect India before becoming Country Manager of Josh, VerSe Innovation’s short video app.
During her tenure as country manager for AnyMind Group, she spearheaded the growth of Anymind beyond India, in UAE and Saudi Arabia and in new business segments.
At NP Digital India, she leads the agency’s business and focusses on development of new capabilities and solutions, and on widening and deepening client relationships.
On the occasion of International Women’s Day, Medianews4u.com caught up with Rubeena Singh Managing Director, NP Digital India.
Q. Is gender inclusivity an issue in the media and entertainment industry?
It is and the data makes it difficult to argue otherwise. Across media and entertainment in India, women remain significantly underrepresented at the decision-making level, even in sectors where they form the majority of the audience. The irony is hard to miss: industries that shape culture, narrative and aspiration are still largely directed by a homogeneous group at the top. The issue is not a lack of talent.
It is a structural one, rooted in how careers are built, how ambition is perceived in women versus men and how organisations define leadership potential. Until those structures are examined honestly, inclusivity will remain a stated value rather than a lived reality.
Q. What would you like to see happen in this regard in the coming three years?
Over the next three years, I would like to see a shift from “counting people” to “making people count”. This means moving beyond diversity metrics and focusing on true inclusivity. I hope to see more companies institutionalising flexible work models and returnship programmes that help women re-enter the workforce after career breaks, without losing their professional momentum.
Most importantly, I want to see more women in P&L-owning roles where they have direct control over the financial and strategic direction of the business.
Q. The PR industry has lots of women leaders. One cannot say the same for agencies, broadcasters etc. What needs to change for more women to enter leadership roles?
The PR industry often offers more flexible work cultures and a focus on relationship management, which has historically attracted and retained female talent. Agencies, on the other hand, have often been defined by a “burnout” culture that rewards long hours over output.
To change this, we must shift the definition of leadership from “whoever stays in the office longest” to “whoever delivers the best strategic results”. Companies need to implement structured succession planning that identifies and grooms female high-potentials early in their careers.
Q. What does NP Digital do to empower women to take important decisions and advance in their careers?
At NP Digital India, the approach is less about creating separate programmes and more about removing the invisible friction points that slow women’s careers down.
That means ensuring women are in the room where strategy is made, not just in the room where it is executed. It means actively building accountability into how senior leaders mentor and sponsor talent. It means evaluating performance on output and ownership rather than on hours logged or visibility.
Q. Is fostering a culture of diversity important for you and NP Digital?
It is absolutely fundamental. For me, diversity is a strategic imperative because it prevents groupthink. At NP Digital India, we work with global brands and diverse audiences, so our internal teams must reflect that world.
A diverse culture brings a broader range of problem-solving techniques and creative insights, which directly impacts our business velocity and the quality of the results we deliver to our clients.
Q. Do most companies in the media and entertainment space only lip service to diversity, equity and inclusion? Does DEI conflict with merit or can they both co-exist?
Honestly, a significant number do. The tell is usually in where DEI lives inside an organisation: if it sits exclusively with HR and surfaces mainly around International Women’s Day or Pride Month, it is largely performative.
Real DEI work lives in hiring panels, in promotion decisions, in how budgets are allocated and in who gets access to high-stakes projects. On the merit question: the framing of DEI versus merit is a false binary and one that deserves to be challenged directly.
Merit does not exist in a vacuum. It is identified, nurtured and rewarded within systems, and those systems have historically not been neutral. Addressing that is not lowering the bar; it is making sure the bar is accessible to everyone who has the ability to clear it. DEI and merit are not in conflict. A poorly designed system that mistakes familiarity for excellence is what actually undermines merit.
Q. In your career has female mentorship been important in your career advancement?
There is a specific kind of knowledge that comes from someone who has navigated the same terrain: how to hold authority without being labelled difficult, how to negotiate without being seen as aggressive, how to own a room while still being collaborative.
Male mentors can offer a great deal, but female mentors often provide a map that is more directly applicable. It’s unfortunate though, that most of my middle later in my career, I never had a female boss. However, I was lucky to have men who not only mentored, but sponsored my growth.
Q. Do we need more mentorship programmes that will provide opportunities for women to advance?
We need more structured mentorship and, even more importantly, sponsorship programmes. While a mentor talks to you, a sponsor talks about you in rooms where you are not present.
We need formalised systems that connect junior and mid-level women with senior leaders who can advocate for their advancement. This shouldn’t be left to chance or informal networking; it should be part of the organisational DNA.
Q. Do women in leadership roles bring more empathy to an organisation?
I would reframe the question slightly. The risk of saying “yes, women are more empathetic” is that it reduces a leadership quality to a gender trait, which is reductive for everyone. What I would say is this: leaders, regardless of gender, who have had to navigate systems not built for them tend to develop a sharper awareness of how organisations feel to the people inside them.
That awareness, which often correlates with empathy, is a genuine competitive advantage. It improves retention, it strengthens team cohesion and it builds the kind of psychological safety that produces better ideas. Organisations with more women in leadership tend to demonstrate this quality more consistently, but the mechanism is structural and experiential, not biological.
Q. Brands across categories queue up to celebrate women on 8 March. The rest of the time many of them do not celebrate women much. Do you see this changing in the coming years?
The one-day sprint model is losing credibility fast, particularly with younger audiences who have a finely tuned radar for ‘performative’ marketing. What we are beginning to see and what I believe will accelerate, is a shift towards brands that build women into their narrative year-round: in product design, in casting, in the problems they choose to solve and in how they spend their media budgets.
The brands that will earn genuine loyalty from women are those that treat them as full rather than as a demographic to be acknowledged once a year. That is both the ethical position and the commercially smarter one.
Q. Would you like to see marketing activities done by brands that encourage women to take that first step towards becoming more independent, tech savvy?
Very much so, and India offers a particularly compelling context for this. The gap between women’s digital access and digital fluency, especially in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets and in regional-language communities, is real and significant.
Brands that choose to close that gap, through campaigns that teach rather than just inspire, have an enormous opportunity. Not just to build goodwill, but to build genuine market relevance in a segment that is growing rapidly. The most powerful thing a brand can do is not just celebrate a woman’s strength on a poster but actually make her stronger through the product or content she encounters.
That is marketing with a real return, measured in trust, in habit and in long-term loyalty while contributing to the economic growth of the entire ecosystem.
