MAM
O&M bags maximum statuettes at IndIAA Awards
MUMBAI: Ogilvy & Mather bagged the maximum number of six awards at the IndIAA Awards, which are organised by theIndia Chapter of the International Advertising Association (IAA).
O&M was awarded for its creative work on brands such as Titan, Kinley, SBI Life, Hero Indian Super League, BMW and Vodafone.
On the other hand, amongst media agencies, Maxus won four awards for Dabur Vatika, Vodafone, Titan and Hero Motocorp.
IndIAA Awards, which held on 13 October at ST Regis Hotel, saw 16 winners from various creative and media agencies. It also included various agency partners from digital, activation, PR and events.
IndIAA awards chairman Pradeep Guha said, “The IndIAA Award format ensured that ‘ads for awards only’ didn’t come through and this itself was the differentiator.”
IAA India chapter president Srinivasan Swamy added, “With the IndIAA Awards, IAA has added another interesting concept to its existing cache of clutter-breaking events. We attempted IndIAA Awards as an experiment; we wanted to create a different way of awarding creativity. With the response to our call for entries and the turnout today, we know that this concept has been very well accepted.”
On the jury for the awards were Unilever COO and Hindustan Unilever non-executive chairman Harish Manwani, Titanmanaging director Bhaskar Bhat, Standard Chartered Bank group head of brand and chief marketing officer Sanjeeb Chaudhuri, State Bank of India managing director and group executive (national banking) B Sriram and Kelloggs India managing director Sangeeta Pendurkar.
“Great brands are built around insights, not analytics,” said Manwani, while addressing the audience in the ceremony.
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Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
