MAM
Former dentsu exec Gautam Mehra joins ProfitWheel as co-founder
Mumbai: Gautam Mehra, dentsu International’s former chief data and product officer – APAC, has announced that he will be joining the recently announced SaaS platform ProfitWheel as co-founder along with Vivek Bhargava and Aman Khanna.
ProfitWheel is a product company focused on creating a customer data-led marketing intelligence platform for the new direct-to-consumer world.
“Gautam and I have worked together for over a decade, and I am delighted to have him on board as a co-founder,” said Vivek Bhargava. “Under his leadership, we will have an increased focus on driving tech innovations and building new products that will enable true intelligence in the mar-tech ecosystem. His past experience of solving a problem local to each market and driving a global product-led solution is precisely what we intend to deliver at ProfitWheel.”
Mehra had joined dentsu Group in 2014 as business head – social media division at iProspect Communicate 2. In his last role at dentsu International (previously dentsu Aegis Network), he spearheaded the programmatic and data segment for the group in the region. He also built DMC (dentsu Marketing Cloud), the proprietary data insights to activation stack for dentsu.
“I am driven by building products that solve large business challenges, and this feels like the right time to build something new, as ad tech reinvents itself,” Mehra said on his new role. “With ProfitWheel, we are focused on solving the biggest problems for D2C brands on effective customer acquisition, enhanced profitability, marketplace expansion, and growth in the most privacy-compliant manner.”
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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.
