MAM
ShopClues makes top talent acquisition for categories div
MUMBAI: ShopClues has appointed Raunak Raheja and Nitin Sharma as category management directors.
While Raheja’s focus at ShopClues will be on scaling up the wholesale marketplace initiative, Sharma will be helming the electronics category.
Raheja will be overseeing the key properties of ShopClues including the neighbourhood store initiative and cross border trade. Heading the wholesale marketplace initiative, he will also be planning the strategic roadmap for B2B channels and driving the refurbished products supply.
ShopClues co-founder and chief business officer Radhika Aggarwal said, “At ShopClues, we are scaling up at a breakneck speed. Category management is a vital vertical for us during this phase of evolutionary growth. I’m pleased to welcome Raunak and Nitin on board at ShopClues. Both of them come with profound experience in e-commerce and category management and we look forward to their valuable contributions to our growth gradient.”
Sharma is a telecom and IT sales professional with over 12 years of experience. He was previously HP India Sales country category manager for Ink Supplies. He has also been associated with other top businesses in the country including Nokia, Idea Cellular, Reliance Communications and Taj Group of Hotels.
Raheja is an e-commerce and retail professional with over 9 years of work experience in marketplace & e-retailing models. He has diverse experience and has also worked with e-commerce companies like eBay, HomeShop18 and Ibibio Web.
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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.
