MAM
Aegon Religare Life ups ad spends by 150% to Rs 250 mn this fiscal
BANGALORE: Aegon Religare Life Insurance (Religare LI) has increased its ad spends to around Rs 250 million for this fiscal as compared to the Rs 100 million that it spent last year.
“We will be maintaining the same levels of spends for the next fiscal too”, revealed Religare LI Chief Marketing Officer Yateesh Srivastava.
Srivastava was speaking with www.indiantelevision.com on the sidelines of a press conference in Bangalore held for the launch of a new online life insurance plan – iTerm by Religare LI.
Since iTerm is a product that we will sell only online, the thrust will be on online and mobile SMS promotions. We will be on portals such as yahoo and insurance products aggregator portals such as policybazaar and myinsurance,” said Srivastava.
Religare LI claims to be the first mover in the online term insurance place and has a 20 per cent of the online term insurance market share at about 1000 policies per month. There are other seven or eight private life insurance players that have launched online term insurance plans and Srivastava estimates the overall online term insurance size currently at 5000 policies per month, a figure that is growing rapidly.
Religare LI has a twin pronged ad spend strategy – its spends money to promote individual product plans or themes, and another one to build the Aegon Religare Life Insurance mother brand. It had Bollywood actor Irfan Khan on TVCs’ in the Bennett Coleman & Co (Times) Group channels exhorting people to ensure that they are not under-insured or have deficit insurance cover for pension.
Ogilvy & Mather handle the creative work for Religare LI, while MediaCom is handling media buying.
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.
