IBC
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Yahoo Mail Vice President (VP) of Business Development and Partnerships Harish Sarma will speak on the IBC panel ‘The Power of Collaboration: How strategic partnerships are transforming broadcasting’ on 12 September.
“At the moment, emails are loosely linked to a calendar, a planner and/or a to-do list. Moreover, today’s email calendars are effectively a set of time blocks with text in them. Imagine instead if that entire experience was reinvented with the end consumer in mind. In that world, the broadcaster or IP owner could have a more meaningful conversation with its customers. For example, a marketing email highlighting upcoming events or shows could be integrated with a calendar feature to enhance discovery and attendance.
“This is completely untouched territory. There's no real solution that exists for this yet, and that means there’s an opportunity. The key to this opportunity is changing the conversation, which starts with IBC.”
Describing recent changes at Yahoo Mail as “an important part of the next chapter for the brand,” Sarma says the 30-year-old business operates in a field – email – that hasn’t seen innovation in decades. “Millions of people use the product every day all over the world. It’s purely functional but it doesn't necessarily bring much more to your life.
“If I ask people about how they feel about email, they'll probably tell me that it frustrates them because of the volume of messages they receive. If it's for work, you need to process it. If it's personal, it ends up being another task to attend to on top of work. Yet, amid all the chores and chaos, sits a tremendous amount of value.” This is what Sarma, with all his expertise, has been hired to unlock.
“Email is one of the highest utility digital products you can have in terms of the value it provides each person, but it also drives a tremendous amount of angst, and frankly, it doesn't feel like people get a lot of joy from emails. Yahoo Mail’s mission is to change the consumer experience with email. Can we keep the good stuff, eliminate the bad and change the game? That’s what caught my curiosity when joining Yahoo.”
NBA TO TIKTOK
As a former investment banker at Morgan Stanley who left to join the National Basketball Association (NBA), Sarma thrives when working out of the box.
At the NBA, he initially focused on deal strategy and valuation before concentrating on commercial licensing, to build out content distribution in more than 190 international markets. “While the NBA is massively popular in the US, China, and now in France, in some countries it's still a niche sport. The challenge was how to bring value and growth to a property like the NBA in non-core markets.”
In 2019, Sarma was recruited by Bytedance to head the Content Business Development department at TikTok at a time when the platform was starting to grow exponentially. TikTok was already a client of the NBA and Sarma doubled down on this, bringing more of the NBA's content onto the video sharing platform.
“We ultimately built out the content function within TikTok not just for sports but also entertainment, lifestyle and gaming. Prior to this, content was categorised, but impact was evaluated based on engagement. Content that drives virality doesn't necessarily translate to what people want to be watching. It could just be what is garnering a lot of attention at a moment in time. Over time, we learned what we really needed to build was silos of high-quality content that met the niche needs of each user across content categories.”
Additionally, Harish is also a member of the IOC Esports Commission, chairing the Platforms and Distribution sector.
EMAIL REVOLUTION
On the IBC panel, Sarma will be joined by executives from Snap, Sling TV and Sky, which may give some clues as to how Yahoo Mail is addressing a media and entertainment audience.
The product is changing too. The first of many expected revamps is a catch-up feature to help users tackle inbox overload. AI-powered summaries provide scannable email previews, giving users the option to ‘delete’ or ‘keep in inbox’ with a simple tap. The final reward? A celebratory screen for users to see how many emails they deleted, and how fast they did it.
“The idea is very simple. Can we transform the email experience to help users filter the information they need from details they do not. The catch-up feature is an AI-powered triage system that we made into a game.”
Announced alongside the news that nearly half of Yahoo Mail users are Gen Z or Millennial, the feature rolled out to Yahoo Mail users on 12 June 2025 with an exclusive partnership with comedian, musician, actor and TikTok creator Morgan Jay and with streetwear brand Anti Social Social Club (ASSC). Snapping this offer up, Comcast has already begun transitioning all Comcast.net email accounts to Yahoo Mail’s AI-driven platform, in under two months since this initial launch.
“There’s a misperception that email is for the older generation and our job is to debunk a lot of that because the data doesn't support it. Knowing that nearly half of our users are Gen Z or Millennial is, for most people, surprising to hear. However, we know we can leverage that to enhance the user experience.
“Another myth is the idea that email is going to die out and be replaced by something much more efficient. Another way to look at it is: ‘What if we can evolve email to work for today’s users?’ We envision an experience where email can do more of the work of organising your personal life for you. We want to change the conversation around how email has worked, and been used, for decades,” concludes Sarma.
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