MAM
Reebok, 22feet Tribal take classic creative steps
NEW DELHI: How do you create excitement around a classic shoe? Well you could take a page out of sportswear company Reebok India. Well, you work with your agency – in this case 22Feet Tribal – and create a competition, invite artists to give their modern day interpretation of it
The shoe in question here is Reebook’s iconic eighties shoe – Classic Leather which was getting a new rendition – Classic Leather Legacy. 22feet Tribal recommended that Reebok should announce a digital art slam contest through its official Instagram account and invite artists all over India to create their versions of the Classic Leather shoe. The campaign was activated with renowned artists and celebs like KatrinKaif pushing the hashtag “WriteYourLegacy.”
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It worked like a charm, reaching 100,000 instagrammers within 10 days.
The brief was to participants was clear: get inspired by the shoe, create an artwork and describe the story around it. Artists from across the country unleashed their creative prowess and the contest received an overwhelming response from over 500 Indian artists. The Digital Art Slam contest concluded with an announcement of the top 10 illustrations on Reebok Classic India Instagram page, which were selected as contest winners and won a pair of Classic Leather Legacy with the top three winners getting featured on the official page.
22feet Tribal Worldwide national creative director Debashish Ghosh was pleased with the results and the buzz it created amongst the community. Says he: “It’s a common truth that people value the overall experience a brand offers as much as the product itself. As Reebok Classic Leather Legacy has serious street creds, this initiative to tap into the culture was always meant to happen. The collaboration with popular artists and the larger creative community to tell a story about the iconic shoe using their artwork was exhilarating. They created some beautiful pieces and by the looks of it, pretty much wrote their own legacy."
The idea to encourage fan communities to participate in a brand’s creative appears novel prima facie and could work well for many other categories. The successful strides that Reebok made with it is a case study worth considering by other marketing and brand managers as well.
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.
