MAM
Alburt Media bags media mandate for Ed-Tech Start-up basicfirst
MUMBAI: BasicFirst, an innovative Ed-Tech start-up, has appointed Alburt Media to manage its media mandate in India. The appointment was a result of a multi-agency pitch. The mandate includes handling overall operations of ATL across India. The account size is estimated to be Rs.300 crores.
Started with a vision to make quality education available in the remotest locations of India, BasicFirst caters to various academic needs of K6 to K12 students. It is an aptitude-based personalized learning initiative by a group of education experts, which offers post-school education and test-prep guidance.
Commenting on the association, Piyush Mishra, CEO, Alburt Media stated, “We are excited to be associated with BasicFirst. India has a huge potential market for Ed-tech and BasicFirst with its innovative products and high-quality content such as ‘24×7 Doubt Clearing App’ and ‘Rent A learning Tablet’ is determined to take a major share of the pie.”
Talking about appointing Alburt Media, Randhir Kumar, Founder & CEO of BasicFirst said, “ The association seems to fit in well as the approach followed by Albert Media is strategic and the customer insights they offer makes them the perfect partner for our growth plans. We look forward to a long and fruitful partnership.”
Govind Mishra, Marketing Head at BasicFirst said, “Alburt Media understood our requirements well. Their proposed strategy and approach was innovative and it captured the sentiments we want to portray for the brand.”
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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.
