MAM
DB Digital appoints Paresh Goel as chief technology officer
MUMBAI: DB Digital, the digital products business of the Dainik Bhaskar Group (DBCL), India’s largest print media company and home to flagship newspapers like Dainik Bhaskar, Divya Bhaskar and Divya Marathi, announced the appointment of Paresh Goel as the chief technology officer.
Goel has a dynamic experience of close to two decades in building and operating technology systems at scale while working with some of the leading digital consumer companies including Adobe. He will be responsible for the technology function at DB Digital.
Prior to joining DB Digital, Goel was VP, Engineering at Meesho, one of the fastest-growing startups in India, and had also started his own company in the Ed Tech space before selling it to Adda247. Prior to that, he was in a technology leadership role at Hike Messenger and Adobe Systems. He is an expert in scaling technology systems across social, content, & commerce and has a proven track record of building products that are used by millions of users now.
DB Digital CEO Pathik Shah commented “I’m extremely excited to welcome Paresh on board. We have worked together in the past on growing consumer products to tens of millions of users and built a lot of innovative features together. We’re looking forward to forming a stellar Product and Technology team for building an extremely high quality, engaging and personalized News product which can serve and delight the entire vernacular news market, the likes of which India, unfortunately, lacks right now. We are at a very interesting stage of growth at present, and we’re looking forward to taking DB Digital to the next level”.
Goel said, "I am delighted to be leading Technology at DB Digital. We have a unique opportunity to create a meaningful impact on users’ lives via a personalised digital news platform. As the internet penetration continues to rise in India, people are looking at us as their trusted brand to deliver them the news most relevant to them on mobile. We will be building the most engaging content experience which is miles ahead of anything else in the market right now. We will further couple this with Machine Learning to surface highly personalized news for our users. People in India deserve high quality, insightful and engaging news – and this is precisely what our mission is. I am ready for and very excited about the challenge.”
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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.
