MAM
Kid Marketing Forum targets tomorrow’s market
MUMBAI: Kids took centerstage as adult marketers, media men and television channel heads attempted to zero in on effective marketing to kids in the first ever Nickelodeon Brand Equity Kid Marketing Forum held yesterday.
A well attended gathering comprising ad, television and entertainment professionals heard out a distinguished selection of speakers, ranging from researchers to film stars, extrapolate on what marks kids in style, attitude and brand loyalty. The focus was on how to appeal to kids, develop loyalty and in effect, develop tomorrow’s markets. Nickelodeon India managing director Alex Kuruvilla set the ball rolling for the event with the observation that the potential of the Indian kids’ market, pegged at an estimated 350 million children, is bigger than the whole of Western Europe combined.
Millward Brown marketing and business development director Jamie Lord followed up with a detailed presentation based on five years of research on pester power. “Honesty and simplicity”, Lord said, “were the biggest essentials while marketing to tweens.” IMRB senior vice president Neerja Wable, who shared the presentation with him, pointed out that even in India, a product category like cars had 71 per cent of kids influencing their parents’ purchase decision. Pester power is definitely on the rise, Wable said, even in rural India, where often the child is the only literate member of the family and is often relied upon for accurate information.
Columbia Tristar Films managing director Uday Singh, in his presentation on the success of the Spiderman story in India, pointed out that localisation of content was key in the success of a foreign product, even as leveraging promotional equity and exploiting the full nature of the product was also crucial, Singh said.
Nickelodeon UK managing director Nicky Parkinson, who said that Nick UK’s key audience was the nine to 11 age group, said the important aspects of brand building are that they have to be available 24/7 and need to be interactive and aspirational as the Nick experience itself shows.
Adman Prahlad Kakkar livened up the post tea session with a peppy talk on kids’ attitudes and mindsets, interspersed with a few clips from ads made by his Genesis Films’ over the last two decades. “Kids mouthing adult scripted dialogue in ads are irritating,” he pointed out. “For children, advertising is entertainment, ads are not just commercial breaks for the young ones,” he said.
Jive Records senior vice president Julia Lipari, the last speaker of the day, said that the worlds of entertainment and brands are intersecting and impacting kids’ space at a faster pace today. A successful kids’ promotion should include a good product, effective packaging, integrated promotions, a free component of pricing and an eye on parents, who are still the gatekeepers for all information flowing to children.
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.
