MAM
Dentsu Webchutney launches B2B division, Samera Khan to lead
MUMBAI: Dentsu Webchutney has announced its new business-to-business marketing division. It will be headed by Samera Khan, EVP – Strategy, Dentsu Webchutney.
“The line between a customer and a consumer is fading day by day. Globally, B2B brands have the largest audience on LinkedIn; they have 36 times more followers on LinkedIn than on Instagram but 20 times more engagement on Instagram than on LinkedIn. The users’ browsing and search behaviour is the same through the day and that’s what we want to own with our B2B division. We want to remove the boring from B2B,” says Dentsu Webchutney CEO and co-founder Sidharth Rao.
The new division is poised to help businesses targeting other businesses across categories and industries. Businesses that work with Dentsu Webchutney will have specialized services available to help them with Online and Offline Marketing, Market Research, Publicity, and most importantly, a focus on Content Marketing and Distribution Strategy.
Khan adds, “Our strategy is to focus on B2B with experiential content marketing across the various touchpoints that the customer already exists on. We pride ourselves on understanding what moves the Indian consumer. Now it’s just about using that same understanding for a business decision maker. Even though our starting point is B2B, our goal is to think of it as H2H (Human to Human), to humanize this crucial relationship.”
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.
