AD Agencies
Catalysts to bridge the gap between digital growth & traditional agencies: Syed Amjad Ali
NEW DELHI: The marketing world has been in a state of constant flux for the past few years. There are emerging trends and technologies popping up everywhere, every few days. Brands are looking forward to ever smarter ways to engage with consumers. And the consumers are moving on to newer platforms for content consumption. While everything is moving at light speed, the marketing world might not really be abreast with trends that are always transforming. This has left a huge void in the industry, which former president of Mullen Lintas Syed Amjad Ali is trying to fill with his new venture, Catalysts.
The start-up aims to utilise the infinite content pool available for non-TV assets today to deliver smarter, sharper, and platform-focused marketing solutions to clients, Ali told Indiantelevision.com’s Mansi Sharma in a recent conversation.
“I have spent more than 25 years at the same organisation, working on some stellar and hugely successful brands and campaigns. And I was thinking about my next step for the past year and a half. That’s when I started planning Catalysts because I felt there is a huge gap in how the world of consumers is evolving and how most agencies are dealing with that. Catalysts will bridge this gap with unique platform-centric solutions to its clients,” he elaborated.
Ali started his marketing journey almost three decades ago and played a big role in the success of brands like LG, OLX, Havell’s, and Micromax in India. He was also one of the founding members of Mullen Lintas in 2015.
It was naturally not a very easy decision for him to move on from an agency that he had started seeing as home. “I owe a lot of what I know to Lintas. It was where I got many unique opportunities at every step of my career and worked personally with legends like Balki (R. Balakrishnan) who helped my professional growth immensely,” he shared.
However, his zest to bring in a substantial change in the course of the industry prompted him to make the jump this year. “A very close friend of mine, who is a big brand consultant, told me that it is the perfect opportunity and time to start something new,” Ali quipped.
He added, “I have very little to lose right now. The whole industry is dealing with a lot at this time and I truly sense a huge pool of opportunities lying out there. The pace at which digital is evolving, especially with Covid2019, and how traditional agencies are evolving are very different. I want to speed up that whole process with the Catalysts.”
Ali also showed immense gratitude towards the whole industry and the people he has previously worked with, who are now extending supporting hands to him.
“Now I realise what I have truly earned with my journey at Lintas. It is this great sense of belief that the industry has in me. It is overwhelming to see so many of my older colleagues and people that I have worked with asking me if I need any help. They all are so eager and willing to participate in the journey of Catalysts,” he noted, with some emotion.
Currently, Ali is working hard to develop a strong open-source model for Catalysts and looking to bring in fresh talent in the small team he is curating for phase one. For the majority of its operations, Catalysts is going to be geo-agnostic and will rely on modern-day technologies to not only deliver solutions but also manage team operations.
He happily added that they are already working on a few client projects, each in very different verticals and stages, and said to expect some exciting news in the coming weeks.
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.
