MAM
Aegis Media aims at widening profits in 2012
MUMBAI: Aegis Media expects to widen its profitability in India this year after breaking even in 2011 as it has set itself the target of doubling growth from each of its business verticals.
“We broke even in 2011. And we expect 2012 to be the first year when we will be significantly profitable,” says Aegis Media chairman (India) and CEO (South East Asia) Ashish Bhasin.
Aegis Media, part of Aegis Group, has four main businesses – media planning and buying; digital and search; Out-of-home and retail; and activation and creative.
“Our target for this year is that every business will have at least double the growth of their own category,” says Bhasin.
Aegis Media does not believe in a silo structure, the way many agencies are run. “We have a unique operating model in that sense. We give the clients all the benefits of specialisation without the hassles of silo-isation. And we are able to do it because we treat India as one country with one P&L (profit and loss).”
WPP, for instance, has its different agencies work independently and report to the parent company separately .
“We are media and agency agnostic. We can work with any agency. We are just media specific and we tell clients what combination of media is good for their product or brand,” Bhasin adds.
Aegis Media‘s aggressively intent got reflected late last year when it acquired a majority stake in Doosra Brand Communications to add creative capability to its India outfit.
So what will Doosra do for growth? “We are looking at quality rather than volume of work from there. We want them to have one or two marquee clients. Take few great companies and do path-breaking work for them, that‘s the direction we are looking at. We have also planned if at some later stage we can get into end-to-end film solution for clients,” says Bhasin.
What about Carat, Aegis Media‘s flagship brand, which was a loss-making outfit? “We had good clients in Carat but were not doing full justice to them. So for the last three years our focus has been to give them more attention and quality. So rather than going out for new businesses we wanted to service them well and get more businesses out of them. So for clients like Philips, of which we had only small part of their account, we now have 100 per cent of it,” says Bhasin.
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.
