MAM
9stacks ropes in Suresh Raina as brand ambassador
MUMBAI: Online gaming platform 9stacks has signed on cricketer Suresh Raina as their brand ambassador. The partnership will see the cricketer in the brand’s upcoming campaigns and promote 9stacks through various engagement activities.
To celebrate the deal, the homegrown poker portal has organised the ‘Raina Freeroll Tournament’ on 27 October 2020 at 7 pm. The pool prize money for the tournament is one lakh rupees and the entry is free for all.
Raina will anchor the brand with his sports charisma and help in creating a higher brand recall amongst the key target audience.
9stacks co-founder Sudhir Kamath said, “It’s been a month since we roped Raina as our brand ambassador and we are super delighted to see the response we have received from our users both existing and new ones.”
Founded by Sudhir Kamath, Pratik Kumar and Rishab Mathur in 2017, 9stacks has emerged as a leading online poker gaming platform. With around 350,000 users, 9stacks currently offers Texas and Omaha variants of poker that engage both experienced players and learners.
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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.
