MAM
DDB MudraMax wins digital duties of Hitachi and Huawei
MUMBAI: DDB MudraMax has won the digital duties for Hitachi Home and Life Solutions (HHLI) and Huawei. The incumbent agency for HHLI is Dentsu Digital while there is no incumbent agency for Huawei.
Commenting on the double wins DDB MudraMax Digital group business director Suraj Nagappa said, “Both Hitachi and Huawei are important wins for us. We won the business in a closely contested pitch with five agencies. We are happy that our clients have shown faith in us and are excited to work with both teams.”
DDB MudraMax president and head of media Sathyamurthy Namakkal added, “With our full fledged and highly qualified digital teams across offices, we are best poised to offer complex and first of its kind digital solutions to our clients. Huawei and Hitachi are very exciting wins for us with immense scope for creative digital solutions.”
Headquartered in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, HHLI is focused on developing and supplying products and technology.
Meanwhile, telecom infrastructure and solutions company Huawei‘s relationship with India goes back to 1999, when it established the first oversea R&D Centre in Bangalore. Over the years, Huawei India has partnered with the Indian government, public sector companies and private enterprises to enable rapid growth of telecommunication services in the country.
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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.
