MAM
DCMN expands insights capabilities in India; onboards Akshay Kapur
Mumbai: The growth marketing partner for digital brands DCMN has announced the expansion of its insights capabilities in India. To help oversee the new expansion, DCMN has brought Akshay Kapur on board.
Based out of Gurgaon, Kapur joins DCMN from audience insights and analytics leader Nielsen, where he spent close to four years working with clients including Pernod Ricard India, DSM, Dabur, Reckitt Benckiser, and GSK.
With ad spend set to cross the Rs one lakh crore mark this year in India alone, brands have never been more aware of the need to invest their budgets in the right audiences and campaigns that will help them drive real growth.
DCMN’s insights solutions are built to eliminate guess-work from a campaign, with capabilities including:
Target group analysis: Helping brands gain a true understanding of their audiences’ socio-demographics, needs, interests, media behavior and drivers for using a specific product or service. From there, marketing teams can better adapt their messaging and campaigns to appeal to these particular demographics.
Ad concept testing: Allowing brands to see which out of a selection of creative ad concepts is the most impactful and will resonate the most with consumers. This ensures businesses are getting the most bang for their buck before launching into the costly production process.
Brand tracking: Measuring metrics such as brand awareness, consideration, usage and loyalty, among others. This is especially helpful to measure before and after a specific campaign, allowing businesses to measure upswing in key branding metrics and understand how successful a campaign really is.
“Performance metrics can only give you so much insight into how well an advertising campaign has performed,” said DCMN country head India Bindu Balakrishnan. “Our clients are increasingly focused on building brand salience and want to know what impact a campaign has had on more nuanced awareness metrics like likeability and brand recognition. These are the questions our Insights product is designed to help answer.”
“Having this overview of both sides of the coin – i.e. both the performance and broader awareness metrics – gives a fuller picture of a marketing campaign’s impact and is invaluable for charting a brand’s growth,” he further added.
To date, DCMN has worked with hundreds of businesses to help them make better strategic decisions with data-based insights, including for unicorn eSports and mobile gaming platform Mobile Premier League, and leading global caller ID app Truecaller.
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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.
