MAM
Dream Theatre to represent Liverpool Football Club in India
MUMBAI: Dream Theatre, India’s foremost brand management and licensing agency, has won the mandate to develop the licensing business of Liverpool Football Club in India and South Asia covering Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Maldives.
Liverpool Football Club’s association with Dream Theatre will give football fans in India access to a licensed range of products across categories like apparel, sporting goods, apparel accessories, gifts and novelties, eyewear and more in the lifestyle segment.
Dream Theatre will be partnering with world-class licensees and working closely with them to launch and grow a comprehensive line of products and services. The licensed LFC merchandise will be available at leading chain stores, standalone outlets and on e-commerce portals.
Liverpool Football Club is one of the most feted and followed football clubs in the world with a global reach of 1.07 billion followers and 450 million audiences on TV in 2017/18. It is one of the most popular English Premier League clubs in India and has been named as one of the most trusted football clubs in India across successive seasons. Dream Theatre, which operates in the spaces of entertainment, sports and lifestyle licensing in India and South Asia and works with some iconic intranational and national IPs, will leverage its prowess and experience in licensing to drive the Liverpool Football Club licensing programme in India.
“We are very proud and thrilled to be working with Liverpool Football Club, the Champions of Europe. The club has such a strong legacy and a very passionate fan base in India. Dream Theatre will forge long-term partnerships with licensees and retailers with one aim: drive value for our partners and delight our fans and consumers with authentic products that are world-class, affordable and accessible”, says Jiggy George, CEO and Founder, Dream Theatre.
Mike Cox, Senior Vice President, Merchandising, Liverpool FC, said: “We’re delighted to welcome Dream Theatre to our global football and retail family. Relationships like this are incredibly important to the club to ensure that we can bring LFC closer to all our supporters who are based across the world, not just at home in Liverpool.”
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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.
