MAM
Aston Villa secures record sponsorship deal with Macron
MUMBAI: Premier League club Aston Villa has inked a record new sponsorship deal with Macron, Italy‘s premier technical sportswear label and official kit manufacturer for the start of the 2012-13 season.
Although the financial details of the deal, which will see Aston Villa become Macron‘s flagship club in the Premier League, were not revealed, the partnership is expected to be in the region of ?20 million.
In addition to Macron supplying the club with official match kit and training apparel for players and management staff to May 2016, Macron will offer a full range of fashion wear – featuring over 100 product lines – including home and away replica kits (also providing a choice of two goalkeeper kits), training and travel apparel, accessories and extensive labels for females, children and infants.
The new home kit will be launched in mid-June at Villa Park and will go on sale immediately. A full range of apparel and accessories will be available from early July, distribution of which will be managed by the Club‘s merchandising department. The away kit will also be available in July.
Villa CEO Paul Faulkner, in announcing the new partnership, said: “Commercially, this is the best deal the club has ever secured with an official kit partner. Macron has established its credibility in the development of high-quality performance football apparel and the sales and distribution of licensed products and this new partnership will significantly benefit Aston Villa in the years ahead.”
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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.
