MAM
BharatPe reaches out to merchants with its new spots
NEW DELHI: BharatPe, has launched its TV campaign starring ‘Team BharatPe’ with 11 Cricket stars. The TVC series has been directed by ace Bollywood director, Puneet Malhotra, and communicates the message ‘Hum Hai Team BharatPe – Jo Desh Ke Har Dukandaar Ke Saath Hai Khade’. This is the first time that a new age FinTech company has rolled out a TV campaign with 11 top cricket stars as its brand ambassadors. Team BharatPe includes Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah, KL Rahul, Mohammed Shami, Ravindra Jadeja, Suresh Raina, Shreyas Iyer, Prithvi Shaw, Sanju Samson, Yuzvendra Chahal, and Shubhman Gill.
The company is set to redefine the financial services landscape with its four TV advertisements designed to drive awareness around BharatPe’s range of financial products for small shop owners across India, including QR based payment acceptance, no collateral loans, card payment machine with 0% transaction fee, and the exciting loyalty program. The new campaign will feature across channels – TV, Print, Radio, digital and will run throughout the cricket and festive season.
BharatPe group president Suhail Sameer said, “BharatPe has been the flagbearer of disruptive marketing. Last year, we created immense brand recall and the merchant connect with Salman Khan as our brand ambassador. Cricket is a great unifier and hence, for this year’s campaign, we decided to build our own team of cricket stars to reach out to merchants and showcase how our range of financial products can help scale their business.”
BharatPe head – brands and commerce Subhasis Beura said, “We will be rolling out a series of 4 TV ads across channels in the coming days. We are hopeful that this campaign will not only help us engage better with our existing merchants but also enable us to reach out to a wide range of prospective merchants across the country. Our TV campaign is well-timed as the merchants are gearing up to shed the impact of COVID and make the most of the festive season. This is timed to catch the cricket fever and the restart of cricket for Team India.”
BharatPe AVP marketing Abhishek Shah said, “Cricket is an ‘unrivalled’ communication platform in reach, engagement, and therefore, impact. We have always connected with small merchants through authentic, credible communication by keeping it light and fun like in case of the last year’s campaign with Bollywood superstar, Salman Khan. The objective of the new campaign is to build demand for our products and services and to humanize the brand. The campaign will serve as a quirky reminder to team up with BharatPe to grow your business.”
Delhi based creative & digital agency ArtE MediaTech facilitated the campaign shoot across two countries and five states.
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.
