MAM
Fogg maker takes on fairness creams with Pretty24
MUMBAI: Taking a stab at fairness creams’ perennial message of fair skin being the benchmark of beauty and success, Fogg deodorant maker Vini Cosmetics (Vini) is touting the idea that every shade of skin is equally beautiful. The company has been plugging the primetime of mainline television channels for the past fortnight or so with the TVC of its latest product Pretty24.
Pretty24 is taking on the might of the entire fairness (read: skin lightening) cream category–which has grown to more than$600 million a year and is dominated by Hindustan Unilever’s (HUL) Fair & Lovely, Emami’s Naturally Fair, Cavincare’s Fairever Fairness , among others. Its positioning: a facial cream which rejuvenates, beautifies, and protects without any claim of lightening the skin shade.
The estimated Rs 700 crore turnover Vini Cosmetics is promoted by one of the breakaway brothers, Darshan Patel, of Paras Pharmaceuticals (the maker of Moov, Itchguard and Krack). And he’s got the funding of two large private equity firms—Bay Capital (9 percent) and Sequoia Capital (12 percent).
Speaking to a financial publication, Patel said: “Personal care brands have all along made consumers believe that one achieves fairness through application of skin creams. But one can never change one’s skin tone. One may minimise or repair the damage caused by aging and pollution, but never change the tone. Pretty24 would liberate Indian women from the discrimination based on skin tone.”
Sources indicate that he has kept aside an advertising budget of around Rs 4 crore for the Pretty24 launch campaign.
The TVC features five dusky determined pretty lasses marching into a beauty products showroom/salon with a mission.
One of them knocks over standi-tubes of fairness creams accusingly stating that first women were taught that only if you are fair, you are beautiful.
Then another of them speaks to the camera bitterly stating that hope was created amongst the dark skinned that fairness is possible.
The third young girl then voices her anguish that every moment they made us feel that only fair folks are considered a success.
The fourth young lady then says what many an Indian girls may be feeling: “They never told us the truth. That human skin can never be lightened.”
Finally, all of them say “enough of this fairness” and toss the tubes away. And up comes the voice over: Pretty24 for all skin colours. And the girls come back and state: “Pretty24. Change your thoughts, not your skin colour.”
The Pretty24 TVC is nothing to write home about in terms of its production or fancy VFX or creative values. It follows Patel’s belief that ads need not entertain, rather they should inform. Speaking to Forbes a year and a half ago he had stated: “Most advertising is 90 percent entertainment and 10 percent knowledge; I have always done the opposite with my advertising.”
His Fogg TVC, too, had demonstrated very openly that the deo had less gas than other long-selling competitors in the market. It featured two glasses; in one of them Fogg is sprayed and in the other a common deo. While the glass with Fogg visibly filled up with each spray, the other glass barely did, indicating the vapour that dissipated.
That TVC worked well for it and it became the number one deo brand, leaving behind HUL’s Axe.
Patel is a savvy marketer. Earlier his company had launched a face cream called Glam-Up, which was promoted as a product to be used on special occasions, which would transform a woman into a glamorous beauty. One of the TVCs had shown a modern young woman, waking up in a golden party dress at home and slowly rising and saying that she is not the fairness type, she is rather the glam type and she uses Glam-Up.
Additionally, he had also launched a face powder called White Tone which was sold on the benefits of giving users an even facial tone, an oil free look and a fair complexion. Those initiatives left a relatively superficial impression on the target audience.
Will he succeed in disrupting the fairness cream category this time with Pretty24? It’s going to be a pretty interesting slugfest.
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.
