AD Agencies
Himalaya launches campaign for its lip care product
MUMBAI: Winters are here and cosmetic companies are leaving no stone unturned to make the most of the weather.
Himalaya has launched a series of three television commercials for the natural intensive lip balm. With humour as a backdrop, the advertisement campaign highlights the brand message – ‘Healthy lips make great conversations.’
The campaign is conceptualised by KarishmaLintas and directed by Rahul Sengupta. Team KarishmaLintas said, “Humour has been our primary ingredient in this advertisement to connect with the youth and share the message that soft and beautiful lips lead to healthy conversations. The idea came by asking “what do people do with healthy lips?” Is it just a healthy smile or a whole lot of talking! With this idea in mind we came with the message “use a Himalaya lip balm taaki baatein sookh na jaye (don’t let your conversations run dry).”
In all the three commercials, the TVC takes a humorous angle where it shows two friends, one who tends to get into trouble a lot and the other who cannot stop her due to her dry lips. It conveys the product benefit in a witty manner.
On the campaign, Himalaya consumer products division business head Rajesh Krishnamurthy said, “The new lip care TVC uses a humorous situation to bring out the functional benefit of using a lip balm regularly. Dry lips are a common problem and we all have faced it sometime or the other. We wanted to build on the fact that healthy conversions are the key to healthy relationships. The message our TVC conveys is ‘don’t let your conversations run dry because of chapped lips.”
AD Agencies
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.
