MAM
Cheil India makes senior appointments
MUMBAI: Advertising agency, Cheil India has appointment Moosa Khan and Nitin Pradhan to strengthen its senior creative leadership.
Moosa Khan will now become the head of digital creative and Nitin Pradhan has taken on the role of senior executive creative director. Khan and Pradhan will both report to Cheil WW India chief creative officer, Sagar Mahabaleshwarkar.
Mahabaleshwarkar mentions, “I am delighted to welcome Moosa and Nitin to our team. Both of them are exceptional creative talents to have on board. While Moosa has immense understanding of new age digital media, Nitin is a fantastic creative talent with great ability of storytelling. Most importantly, we all have a shared passion for creative excellence and digital innovation. With these beliefs firmly at the heart, Moosa and Nitin will be a tremendous asset to our bold creative ambitions.”
Moosa Khan and Nitin Pradhan have joined Cheil WW India with the responsibility of inspiring and mentoring the creative and digital team to think big and embrace the agency’s philosophy of technology + creativity.
Cheil WW India chief operating officer Atika Malik says, “We are the Agency of Now where creativity is inspired by technology. I am extremely happy that Moosa and Nitin will add their digital capability, creativity and energy to Cheil. I look forward to working closely with them to inspire new ideas and solutions for our progressive brands. For 15 years Cheil in India has provided brand solutions across retail, experiential, digital and communication to transform our client’s businesses.”
Khan brings with him over 10 years of experience in digital as well as traditional advertising. He has worked across agencies such as Dentsu Webchutney, Madison, TBWA and Jack in the Box Worldwide. Some of the clients he’s worked with include Airtel, Whirlpool, United Nations, ITC, Panasonic, Times of India, Payback, Tetra Pak, Nissan, Microsoft & Pepsi. He has won multiple awards including metals at Goafest and the Kyoorius Creative Awards.
Nitin Pradhan, a known name among the advertising fraternity, has 17 years of experience working with the best in the industry – Ogilvy, JWT, McCann, Leo Burnett and the likes. In addition to his diverse experience, he boasts of many accolades to his credit. An alumnus of MICA, he has to his credit many successful campaigns like – KBC Season 2 : Umeed Se Dugna, KBC Season 3 : Kuchh Sawaal Zindagi Badal Saktey Hain, Amaron, Bank of India (Rishton ki Jamapunji campaign) Tata Sky and Tata Sky Plus (campaigns featuring Aamir Khan), Red Label & 3 Roses Tea, Ceat tyres, Nestle Alpino, Maggi and Makemytrip among others.
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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.
