MAM
Blue Vector launches homegrown film agency Dot Films
Mumbai: Blue Vector on Tuesday announced the launch of a homegrown film agency Dot Films. The philosophy driving this venture is to create form-first audio-visual spectacles that look and sound artful and evoke emotions, it said in a statement.
The Dot Films will comprise the team that primarily looks after films at Blue Vector. The team will have Yashi Paswan, Shrey Deepranjan, and Rhiju Talukdar at the helm of its leadership.
Blue Vector also revealed that there are more company launches in the pipeline, with an end-vision to cover the whole gamut of marketing and creativity, including the involvement of tech.
Dot Films already has a significant portfolio with work for clients like Delhivery, Nykaa, Mont Blanc, IAmAnimal, and ITC Hotels. The team has plans to continue to grow these verticals and also its own partnerships and networks with agencies and talent in India and abroad.
The agency will allow the ‘art’ of filmmaking to take precedence in a massive, ever-growing content landscape that’s littered with tones, treatments, concepts, and quality without any real benchmark, according to the statement.
“I think for the Dot Films team it’s been a very natural and also personal progression, almost cathartic, to finally put Dot into action. Here’s to doing some literally intent-led work going forward,” commented Dot’s co-founder and creative producer Yashi Paswan.
For the last five years, Blue Vector has operated mostly as a monolithic creative house, with a suite of creative services under the same roof – branding, films, social media marketing, and the likes. With the acquisition of Content Ninja in 2019, with its B2B inbound marketing toolbox, the one-stop-shop started the internal process of ‘diversification into specialisation.’
Starting this year, Blue Vector is putting into action its strategy to ride out the agency wave with separate businesses for its separate services, each with its own specialisation and business strategy. “Dot Films will be the first homegrown company to leave the nest while still tethered to it. Its specialisation is further deepened with specific categories for the films they will be conceptualising and producing for, i.e, for brand, travel, and music narratives,” said the agency.
Casting more light on this new venture, Blue Vector founder Piyush Kedia said that trying to be good at everything while also doing everything isn’t very prudent from a growth point of view, especially in the agency business. “The idea was to scale through a semi-organic method of networking, offshoring, acquisitions and business spin-offs. The lockdowns gave us a lot of time to plan and strategise, and that’s why I think we were fortunate to be able to start executing all this. We’re about to do some very interesting things and I’m very keenly looking forward to this future,” he added.
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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.
