MAM
MMA India announces Marketer only Jury for Smarties 2019 Awards
MUMBAI: Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) India, today announced the Jury for the 2019 edition of the MMA India Smarties Awards and as always it’s a only marketers jury. Keeping in mind the inorganic growth of new age marketing ecosystems Ravi Desai of Amazon India has been appointed as Jury Chair. The 2019 edition of the awards will be handed out on 27 September 2019 at the Smarties awards night to be held at Taj, Santacruz Mumbai. However, the jury deliberations are scheduled for 29th of August this month.
Accompanying Ravi Desai of Amazon India as Jury Chair, the following senior brand marketers are jurors for the 8th edition of Smarties:
Pawan Sarda – Group Head Digital, Future Group
Abhishek Desai – Marketing Director, Procter & Gamble, India Sub-Continent
Amit Sethiya – CMO, Syska Group
Amit Tiwari – Vice President Marketing, Havells India
Asha Kharga – CMO, Axis Bank
Deepali Naair – Director Marketing, IBM India & South Asia
Gauravjeet Singh – General Manager Media (South Asia), Unilever
Hitesh Malhotra – CMO, Nykaa
Jayraj Jadhav – Head of Marketing & E-commerce, TATA AIG
Neel Pandya – Head of Media, L’Oréal
Nipun Marya – Director Brand Strategy, Vivo India
Punitha Arumugam – Hotstar Transformation and Ads, Hotstar
Ravi Santhanam – CMO, HDFC
Rohit Dadwal – Managing Director APAC, MMA
Sai Narayan – PaisaBazaar Group
Sujit Ganguli – Senior General Manager & Head – Corporate Brand and Communications, ICICI Bank Ltd
Sandeep Ranade – Executive Director and Co-Lead West (Quantitative), Insights, Kantar
Smarties 2019 Jury Chair, Ravi Desai said, “It will not be easy judging the entries this year, where except, that the level of creativity brought to the table will exceed our expectations as the standards of submission improve year on year. I am excited to be the jury chair for this year’s MMA Smarties awards. This is such a great platform for the mobile marketing fraternity to connect, innovate and transform the way people experience brands via technology.”
Back for its eighth season this year, the Smarties India Awards have grown rapidly, remaining focused on its core mission to accelerate the transformation and innovation of marketing through mobile in the region. The Awards is the world’s only global mobile marketing awards program that honours innovation, creativity, success and Business Impact.
Moneka Khurana, Country Head, MMA India, “MMA Forum & Smarties is a unique annual event that brings the greatest marketing minds on to one platform to identify and celebrate the plethora of emerging talent and technologies in the industry. It’s not every day you get the best ideas and the brightest minds in the mobile marketing world in one room. Being evaluated by a marketer only jury comprising CMOs and business leaders is an endorsement in itself for the great work being done the industry.”
MMA continues to build on its mission to accelerate the transformation and innovation of marketing through mobile and SMARTIES is one of MMA’s most recognised platform which showcases the best of the best in mobile marketing and recognising those that have created new benchmarks and engaged consumers in a way that is only possible through mobile.
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.
