MAM
Grey bags Muthoot’s creative biz
MUMBAI: Grey Worldwide has won the creative mandate of Muthoot Group following a multi-agency pitch held in Delhi and subsequently in Cochin.
The business will be handled out of agency‘s Delhi office, with Grey‘s Bangalore office also playing a key role for the South Market.
The Muthoot Group has gold loan business, financial Services, securities and a host of allied interests. Grey has been mandated to handle all of these. Having established itself in the South, the Muthoot Group is now seeking to enter and consolidate its presence in the North, West and East markets.
Grey Delhi VP and branch head Dip Sengupta said, “It‘s a great win ! From the very first meetings with the Muthoot Group, we were moved by the ethics and value systems that drive this great brand. Our task is to help make the brand iconic.”
“It was great to be a part of such a diverse pitch and of course to win it eventually! It takes a lot to identify a powerful brand idea and to make it relevant for Muthoot‘s diverse markets. It was a great challenge and we look forward to this partnership,” Grey Bangalore, VP and branch head Hari Krishnan added.
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.
