MAM
Amrita Thapar named as CMO for Microsoft India
MUMBAI: Microsoft Corporation (India) has named Amrita Thapar as the new chief marketing officer (CMO). Thapar’s LinkedIn profile confirms her taking over the new role for the tech giant in January.
Thapar also headed India Communications at Amazon Web Services (AWS) before moving on to her new role.
Erstwhile India’s chief marketing officer, Hitu Chawla has joined into a new role at Microsoft, sources told Indiantelevision.com, while declining to disclose any further details.
Chawla has served 16 years at the American multinational technology corporation. Having started as a marketing & communications manager in 2006 and rose through the ranks to become a senior director (Partner Go-To-Market strategy) of the organisation in the US in 2017, before taking on the mantle of CMO at Microsoft India in May 2020.
A marketing and communications professional with nearly 25 years of experience, Thapar has worked at companies spanning broadcast television, media strategy, and professional services both big tech giants in India and globally. She also has worked in television programming, corporate strategy and sales before pivoting to marketing and communications.
Previously, Thapar served as vice president of marketing and communications at Genpact in a stint lasting over thirteen years. She has also worked in corporate strategy at The Times of India Group and served as a television producer at NDTV. She has reported and produced shows including ‘Night Out’, ‘Jeena isi ka naam hai’, ‘Moneywise’ and ‘IT: India Tomorrow’ at NDTV. She was also a member of the core response team for COVID-19 at Genpact in 2020 and AWS in 2021.
Armed with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Lady Shri Ram College at Delhi, Thapar lists her areas of expertise as brand storytelling, content and digital operations, mergers & acquisitions (M&A), reputation management, virtual collaboration, thought leadership, to name a few, to deliver business growth objectives.
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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.
