MAM
Coca-cola bridges Christmas miles with a radio love letter to OFWs
MUMBAI: Home doesn’t always come wrapped in ribbon sometimes, it arrives on the radio. This Christmas, The Coca-cola Company transformed Australia’s airwaves into an emotional lifeline for millions of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), launching SoundOfHome.FM, a 24-hour festive broadcast designed to bring the sound of family back to those celebrating far from home.
Running from 6 pm on Christmas Eve to 6 pm on Christmas Day, SoundOfHome.FM stitched together Caroloke sessions (a festive mash-up of carols and karaoke), personal voice notes and heartfelt dedications recorded by families across the Philippines. Broadcast across Australia, the initiative turned radio into a long-distance love letter, closing emotional gaps that geography could not.
The idea tapped into a familiar Christmas truth: the season often weighs heaviest on those who give the most. For OFWs, the quiet backbone of countless households, the holidays amplify distance. To make sure every message found its way home, Coca-Cola created a notification system that alerted listeners when their family’s dedication was about to air, ensuring no moment was missed.
Weeks before Christmas, the brand took the idea on the road with a nationwide Caroloke Caravan, recording messages at Pasko festivals and city centres across the Philippines. Families also uploaded dedications digitally, expanding participation beyond physical locations. The result was a rolling soundtrack of gratitude, love and longing carried not by video screens, but by voices.
The initiative was accompanied by a Christmas film, Sound of Home, capturing real reactions from OFWs mid-shift from mechanics and kitchen hands to convenience store staff as familiar voices cut through the noise of everyday work. The scenes were quiet, raw and unmistakably human.
“During the holidays, distance can feel heavier than ever,” said Coca-cola marketing director for ASEAN & South Pacific Francis Izon Reyes. “With SoundOfHome.FM, we wanted to bring a piece of home to Filipinos overseas, a voice, a carol, a reminder that their sacrifices are seen and valued.”
Creative agency Ogilvy described the campaign as “closing the silence, if not the distance”, using radio, one of the simplest media formats to deliver one of the season’s most emotionally resonant ideas.
In a year crowded with loud festive campaigns, SoundOfHome.FM chose a softer frequency proving that sometimes, the most powerful Christmas gift isn’t being home, but hearing it.
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.
