MAM
Fabindia & ITC Sunfeast Baked Creations partner to launch dine-in cafes
Mumbai: Fabindia and ITC Sunfeast Baked Creations have partnered to open dine-in cafes at select Fabindia stores across India. ITC Sunfeast Baked Creations offers quality baked goods tailored to the Indian palate, combining convenience with expertise in the food-delivery space. The café’s menu features pull-apart bagels, croissants, gourmet breads, and a range of beverages. Customers can also enjoy services such as birthday celebrations, bulk ordering, Diwali gifting, and kitty parties at the café.
A Fabindia spokesperson said, “We are super excited to partner with ITC Sunfeast Baked Creations. When you step into a Fabindia Experience Centre, it’s about more than just retail, it’s about the total experience. Our joint commitment to quality and freshness is in step with similar values both shares. Health, nutrition and quality are of equal importance and Fabindia has always been about maintaining a balance between taste, ethically sourced ingredients and our customer’s choices.”
ITC spokesperson said, “We are thrilled to partner with Fabindia, a pioneer in not just the retail space, but in the craft space as well. Offering the best food, prepared with the finest ingredients has always been our ethos. ITC Sunfeast Baked Creations is privileged to be working with Fabindia and has a chance to reach out and touch more customers in many more places across the length and breadth of 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.
