AD Agencies
Dentsu Aegis Network announces rebranding of Dentsu Branded Agencies
MUMBAI: Transformation is in the air at Dentsu Aegis Network’s Dentsu Branded Agencies.
One of the key advantages that Dentsu Aegis Network has as a network is, to create collaborations that keep clients’ business at heart. In a key move to help clients better leverage the capabilities of a global network, Dentsu Aegis Network has realigned agencies across several countries under three groupings.
In India, this is now being manifested in three of its creative agencies being rebranded to better reflect this alignment.
As a consequence, Dentsu Communications will now be known as Dentsu India, Dentsu Marcom will now be known as Dentsu One and Dentsu Creative Impact will now be known as Dentsu Impact. Meanwhile, Taproot Dentsu and Dentsu Webchutney remain unchanged.
Said Dentsu Aegis Network India & south Asia chairman & CEO Ashish Bhasin: “This new nomenclature is a first step towards expanding and reinforcing the global and regional services we provide our clients in India. It will help us serve our global clients better as well as acquire more new business.”
Commenting further on the change, Ashish Bhasin added, “We are consolidating our capabilities under a global agency network, with a uniform identity across markets, in order to strengthen the coordination across our network and expand the high quality service we consistently provide. The most important ingredient in creating innovation in an ever-changing environment is collaboration. This realignment will fuel, just that in newer, more efficient ways. This will help us further accelerate the tremendous success that Dentsu Branded Agencies have experienced in India over the last year, including the spectacular performance at Goafest awards and in the area of new business.”
There is no change in the leadership or staff of each of the individual units, Dentsu announced. Simi Sabhaney will continue as CEO and Vipul Thakkar as NCD of Dentsu India, Harjot Narang as President and Titus Upputuru as NCD of Dentsu One, and Amit Wadhwa as president and Soumitra Karnik as NCD of Dentsu Impact. Meanwhile, Narayan Devanathan continues as the group executive & strategy officer of Dentsu Branded Agencies, India.
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.
