MAM
‘Blow The Whistle’ for road safety campaign
MUMBAI: SABMiller India’s ‘Respect the Road’- Don’t drink and drive campaign, launched ‘Blow The Whistle’ initiative on digital media to promote the message of responsible drinking and overall road safety.
As a part of this initiative, people would be given whistles to blow against all kinds of road and traffic offenders e.g. signal jumpers, rash drivers, people indulging in drinking and driving etc.
Respect the Road is India’s biggest Don’t drink and drive campaign on digital platform. Going beyond highlight the perils of drunk driving, the Facebook page of the campaign will now also highlight dangerous and risky road behavior leading to road accidents and fatalities.
SABMiller India VP sustainability and communications Meenakshi Sharma said: “Promoting responsible drinking is one of the core sustainable priorities for SABMiller worldwide. Through ‘Respect the Road’- Don’t drink and drive campaign, we promote responsible drinking encouraging people to use alternatives to drinking and driving such as calling a cab, hiring a chauffeur or designating a buddy to drive. Blow The Whistle initiative is an extension of our campaign and goes a step further to involve people giving them the responsibility to take action and spread the word about road safety. We are confident that people will step out of their comfort zones and blow the whistle against road offenders.”
The page will showcase whistle creatives and images of people blowing whistles at traffic offenders. The objective is to involve people and encourage them to participate in this campaign to address the issue of road safety. People can post pictures of road offenders, share their experiences and testimonials of blowing whistles at offenders and send in pictures and videos of what/who would they blow the whistle against. The campaign would also urge people to help the victims in a road mishap and respond when they hear a whistle on the street.
Geek Creative CEO Mayank Agarwal said: “Blow The Whistle was conceptualized as an initiative to involve people on ground and encourage them to take up the issue of road safety. Through social media, we will engage with people through pictorial representations, participation through quizzes, contests and encourage people to use a whistle against traffic and road offenders. Our strategy involves a 360 degree integration of the top digital platforms to connect with our audience and spread awareness about road safety.”
The campaign will be taken on ground during the festive season this year where people can come and share their thoughts on making the roads safer. Whistles will be distributed to people for them to blow it against the road offenders and rule breakers. Other engaging activities like quizzes, street plays will be organised to create awareness about the campaign and the issue of road safety.
The campaign has staged interactive street plays on responsible drinking, tied up with radio station urging listeners to pledge for responsible drinking and associated with cab services to spread the message of responsible drinking and road safety.
The Facebook page of the campaign (https://www.facebook.com/respecttheroad) is highly interactive with more than 30,000 followers. Recently a safety shayari contest was organised where twitteratis tweeted Road Safety slogans in form of Shayari along with the hashtag # Blow the Whistle. Within hours both Blow the Whistle and Safety Shayari hashtags # were trending all over India and the campaign reached to over one lakh people.
SABMiller India’s ‘Respect the Road’- Don’t drink and drive campaign has partnered with Home Safe, Delhi NCR’s first chauffeur service, popular radio taxi providers Mega Cabs and radio station Radio City 91.1 FM.
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.
