MAM
Yalochat appoints Nitin Sunder Mirchandani as CEO for India and South East Asia
MUMBAI: Yalochat, an artificial intelligence-driven customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps companies build personalised relationships at scale, announces the appointment of Nitin Sunder Mirchandani as its chief executive officer (CEO), India and Southeast Asia. With over two decades of technology and leadership experience, Mirchandani will drive Yalochat’s momentum in India with a growing number of organisations and brands using its chat-based, customer engagement solutions.
Mirchandani will work directly with founder and CEO, Javier Mata, to drive Yalochat’s growth in India by developing strong engineering and sales & marketing teams to build and promote its products.
Yalochat brings AI-powered CRM solutions built atop the WhatsApp ecosystem to help brands increase customer engagement, effectiveness and sales, in real-time. The Yalochat platform automates over 90 per cent of customer conversations. Through this platform, Yalo has helped brands like Amazon to increase conversion rates by double digits and has substantially reduced costs for companies like Unilever and PepsiCo.
Yalochat India and SEA CEO Nitin Sunder Mirchandani said, "India is at a tremendous inflexion point for messaging-driven brand engagement. Given increasing smartphone and data penetration and an innate consumer preference for instant messaging platforms such as WhatsApp (over 350 million active users in India), Yalochat offers companies the opportunity to exponentially increase customer engagement with unprecedented levels of personalisation. We are looking forward to working with enterprise customers in India as they embrace the power of instant messaging with today’s highly connected and savvy customers.”
Before joining Yalochat, Mirchandani was with LinkedIn and spent 19 years of his career with Microsoft in business leadership roles — accelerating the adoption of emerging cloud technologies and driving revenue growth. He has been steadfastly focused on driving transformational growth strategies for enterprises with new solutions, incubating new products across industries and building market share.
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.
