MAM
WebEngage appoints Ankur Gattani as VP, growth and marketing
Mumbai: Full-stack marketing automation and customer data platform WebEngage on Tuesday announced the appointment of Ankur Gattani as VP, growth and marketing.
Gattani has over 13 years of experience including as a customer, mentor, and advisor to WebEngage in his previous roles. In this role, he will be taking charge of the entire growth marketing function at Webengage to sharpen the company’s positioning as a thought leader in retention marketing and a champion of building enduring businesses, said the statement.
“As a customer-first company, our primary focus has always been in investing towards the growth of our customers and building success for them in their journey,” said WebEngage co-founder and CEO Avlesh Singh. “Ankur’s expertise in customer success and data-driven marketing efforts along with his valuable insights is crucial for the growth of the brand. We look forward to him playing a key role in WebEngage’s next phase of growth.”
An IITB/IIM Cal graduate, Gattani’s stint at Foodpanda Global to drive CRM efforts led to the transformation of one message-per-country regimen to 1:1 personalised messages on multiple channels across 45 countries, 20+ timezones and languages. The speed of roll-out earned his team accolades and a speaker invite from Salesforce to share the story at Dreamforce – a flagship event by Salesforce.
He has dabbled in ideas in e-commerce and created a consumer FMCG brand as well, is a big believer in driving stories and analogies to help customers understand the brand proposition better.
“Our company’s vision is to drive and create strategic business value for WebEngage and its customers and enable them to have a successful journey with their users,” said Gattani. “I am glad to have this opportunity and join the team to accelerate the growth with marquee brands and build user engagement with successful campaigns.”
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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.
