MAM
Barclays Premier League on India promotion tour
MUMBAI: Barclays Premier League is on an India promotion tour. Barclays, the official sponsor of the soccer league, has announced the Barclays Premier League Trophy four-city tour.
The trophy will visit different parts of the country.
The Trophy‘s tour has started in Mumbai and will be here till 12 December, in Chennai on 13 December, in Pune from 14- 16 December and in New Delhi from 17- 18 December.
Barclays together with the ex-India internationals will also conduct a football coaching clinic for a group of underprivileged children of the Magic Bus foundation in Mumbai on 11 December.
The Barclays Premier League Trophy was unveiled at Mumbai in the presence of senior Barclays officials including Barclays Wealth MD Satya Bansal MD and Barclays Corporate MD Karan Bhagat. Also present at the Trophy unveiling were former Indian soccer players such as I M Vijayan, Jo Paul Ancheri, Kiron Khongsai, Ilyas Pasha, Aqueel Ansari, Bhaskar Maity, Sanath Seth, Godfrey Pereira, Jamshid Nassiri and Bernard Pereira.
The owner of Churchill Brothers football club Churchill Alemao was also present. The Indian footballers and club owner were felicitated by Barclays for their contribution to the development of the sport.
Barclays Bank CEO India Mani Subramanian said, “Our association with the Premier League which started way back in 2001 has been one of the longest sports sponsorships for us. This association has made Barclays synonymous with the Premier League and it helps us connect with millions of people, clients and more importantly football fans not only in regions where we operate but also in regions where people love and follow the Barclays Premier League.”
Barclays had renewed its global title sponsorship of the Barclays Premier League in October 2009 with a new deal worth ?82.25 million, which runs until the end of the 2012-13 season. By the end of the new sponsorship deal, the Barclays Group will have been the sponsors for 12 years from 2001 to 2013. Manchester United is the most successful Premier League team having won the title 11 times and never finishing outside the top three. More players appearing in the 2006 and 2010 Fifa World Cups from this league than any other domestic football league.
Barclays has invested over ?37 million through its ‘Barclays Spaces for Sports programme’ that has created community sports sites and projects around the globe including 200 in the UK. Besides it has also created sites in Zambia, South Africa, and the USA with new football programmes continuing to be rolled out internationally.
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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.
