MAM
AAAI announces contest to redesign its logo
Mumbai: The Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) on Tuesday announced a contest to redesign its logo to reflect the future of advertising and recast the descriptor ‘Advertising Agencies Association of India’ so as to showcase the evolving larger world of marketing communications. The contest is open to all creative individuals and advertising agencies.
The association also emphasised that the acronym AAAI (the three As of I) has a rich legacy and a fabulous brand recall which it does not want to tamper with.
AAAI also announced that the winner of the contest will be given a cash prize of Rs one lakh along with an all-expenses-paid trip for a team of two to attend Goafest 2022, which is scheduled between 5-7 May in Goa.
FCB Group India Group chairman and chairman of this contest Rohit Ohri said, ‘The advertising industry is facing its biggest transformation ever. The key question is not whether advertising will change, but how radically it will do so. It is high time that the AAAI identity changes to reflect this new direction being taken by the industry.”
“The present AAAI logo was designed in 2005, since then advertising has undergone a sea change and it is high time that we allow the next generation to take AAAI’s identity into the future,” AAAI president Anupriya Acharya said. “Keeping this in view, it was felt that AAAI should also forge a new identity which would reflect the current and future direction that the industry is taking.”
The last date for receiving entries of the designs is 15 April, said the statement.
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.
