MAM
Bira 91 & Prateek Kuhad’s ‘Always Summer’ is an ode to 2020
NEW DELHI: Beer brand Bira 91 has released its debut music video ‘Always Summer’ featuring singer-songwriter and musician Prateek Kuhad. Bira 91 synced this beautiful track titled Kho Jaane Do with him to celebrate that warm feeling of summer with a cold beer by one’s side. The film captures precious moments indoors that we all witnessed this year, leaving one with a hope of a joyful outdoor summer very soon.
Kho Jaane Do by Prateek Kuhad is featured as the video’s main background score. The film looks back at the times when we enjoyed carefree and happy summer days – outdoors, meeting friends, going for trips and unwinding, to the one in 2020 where we spent our entire summer indoors; we found new ways of spending time by picking up new hobbies, learning new skills, strengthening our relationships with family and friends, and found new reasons to celebrate and feel alive every day. The story showcases optimism of these moments and ends on a high note with the hope of going back to the summer we know and enjoying a crisp Blonde Summer Lager on a hot day.
Bira 91 VP marketing Deepak Sinha said, “The pandemic this year, right at the outset of the beer season, got us a lot closer to our consumers and we saw unprecedented love and stories pouring in from our community. This inspired us to narrate the story of summer 2020 though this music video, and with a hope of a better and safer tomorrow where we will be back outdoors with our beers. This beautiful track by Prateek was perfect to visually emote and instil that feeling of joy, warmth, good cheer and hope.”
The film was created by Homegrown India, directed by Aneesh Malankar, with the song written, composed and sung by Prateek Kuhad.
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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.
