MUMBAI: The Grand Finale of the second season of ‘Media Ke Surtaj’ was held on Friday at Bungalow 9 in Mumbai. Organized by SPN’s music cluster channels, Sony MIX and Sony ROX HD and hosted by RJ Salil.

A Karaoke competition amongst media professionals, Media Ke Surtaj, brought out hidden singing talent among media agency professionals. The audition rounds were held across Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru in agencies like OMD, Carat, Lodestar, Initiative, Publicis, Madison, ZenithOptimedia and GroupM between15-24 March 2017. Elevated levels of enthusiasm and participation were displayed among all the participants and 180 contestants were shortlisted for Friday's finale.

The event was massive and the audience swayed and cheered all along the event. The winners were selected in two categories namely, the Popular choice and the Critics’ choice. Each category had two sub-categories, i.e, Solo and Duet. The video of each participant’s audition was up on www.mediakesurtaj.com for an audience poll. The voting closed on 7 April, with 32000+ votes being registered. The popular choice category winners were selected based on the maximum votes received. The jury for the Critics’ Choice Awards included the masters of the industry including music composer Ajay Singha and singer Ash King, among others.

Ecstatic at the win, the Popular Choice Solo winner, Pankaj Dobhal from ZenithOptimedia, exclaimed, “I had not expected to win a singing competition my entire life. Doing something beyond your daily routine feels great and I would like to thank everyone who voted for me and had faith in my voice.”

With all excitement, Critics’ choice Duet winners, Craig Viegas and Prachi Kalkar, GroupM said, “Singing has always been our hobby, never knew that it would get us such a big reward. We would like to thank Sony MIX for this initiative and giving us such a great platform to showcase our hidden talents.” Apart from these, Popular Choice Duet category winners were Ashish Rane and Neelam Shridhankar from Carat Media and the Critics Choice Solo category award was bagged by Gaurav Chopra from GroupM.

The winners of the popular choice category won prizes worth INR 20,000 and the critics’ choice category got an all-expense paid trip to Dubai for two.

Talking about this innovative programme, Sony Pictures Networks India (SPN) Senior EVP & Business Head – Max Cluster & Sony Mix Neeraj Vyas said, “I feel, for most of us music is an integral part and one of the key drivers in our daily lives. Hence, we decided to use this musical platform to encourage media professionals to showcase their hidden talent while they get a break from their daily routine. We at SPN were elated with the first season of Media Ke Surtaj and extremely overwhelmed with the response received in this second season as well and will hopefully expand to new horizons soon.”