MAM
Starcom Worldwide wins BIBA’s media duties
MUMBAI: Starcom MediaVest Group’s Starcom Worldwide has won the media duties of BIBA Apparels.
The account will be handled out of the agency’s Delhi office.
BIBA is a brand that caters to all apparel & fashion needs of a woman. BIBA has also joined hands with Futurebrands to realise its ambition of emerging as a big player for ethnic women wear.
BIBA Apparels MD Siddharath Bindra says, “We wanted to partner with an agency that understands innovation and excellence. We are proud to have chosen Starcom as our media agency and look forward to a relationship that benefits brand BIBA.”
Futurebrands head – brand partnership Aanchal Jain adds, “We need partners who excel in creative solutions to achieve breakthroughs for new entrepreneurial brands at excellent ROIs. Starcom’s repeated success with launching new brands and products in India, backed by buying efficiencies of VivaKi Exchange, is very motivating for us.”
Starcom Worldwide executive director – India North Tarun Nigam notes, “BIBA is a brand that has become synonymous with the latest fashion. By choosing us as their media planning company BIBA is ensuring that they are taking their marketing goals to the next level. We are excited about managing the media investments for this brand.”
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.
