MAM
Dentsu Communications hires Suresh Mohankumar as national planning head
MUMBAI: Dentsu India Group has appointed Suresh Mohankumar as national planning head at Dentsu Communications.
Mohankumar will lead strategic planning and brand management at Dentsu Communications across its offices in New Delhi and Bangalore and will be based out of Bangalore. With nearly two decades of experience, he joins Dentsu from Mudra India where he was senior vice president and head of planning – Mudra South.
Dentsu India executive chairman Rohit Ohri said, “Suresh has the right combination of passion, talent and commitment to partner our creative and account management teams to take our creative product to the next level.”
Dentsu Communications chief operating officer Taira Kimura said, “Suresh brings on board strong experience across brand, categories and regions. I have great confidence in his abilities and expertise to add value to our service deliveries and up the ante at Dentsu Communications.”
Mohankumar said, “The communications business is at a crossroads as convention increasingly gives way to real consumer engagement. That integration and media-neutral planning is the way forward is exactly what Dentsu believes in and I believe that Dentsu is uniquely structured to deliver that. Also as part of an organisation at the cusp of an exciting transformation, I am very excited about my journey ahead and look forward to my mandate at Dentsu Communications.”
A commerce graduate, Mohankumar completed his MBA with a dual specialisation in marketing and finance from T.A. Pai Management Institute (TAPMI) in 1993. He started his career in account management with RK Swamy/BBDO in Chennai. Over the next seven years, he worked with Contract and Lowe in Bangalore. He switched to account planning in 2000 when he moved to Mudra Chennai. As a strategic planner, he then worked with Contract and JWT in Chennai.
He has in the past been associated with brands like Tanishq, BPL, Ford, Volkswagen, Carbon, MRF, Lotte, TI cycles, Henkel, Fa, Reynolds, McDowell’s, Johnson & Johnson and Lipton.
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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.
