AD Agencies
Goafest day two blends bold ideas, brand battles and billboard truths under the Goan sun
MUMBAI: The second day at Goafest 2025 closed on a power-packed note, stitching together the evolving face of leadership, storytelling, advertising, and digital strategy with candid charm and calculated insight.
The post-lunch energy got a creative jolt with the session ‘WTF is Creative Leadership Now?’, where industry veterans Bobby Pawar, Sonal Dabral, Senthil Kumar and Lulu Raghavan broke down the evolving role of the CCO. “If you’re not in an agency where the CCO is central, you’re in the wrong one”, Bobby declared, dubbing the creative head the “instigator-in-chief”. Lulu called for reinstating the CCO as the creative spine, not a spreadsheet slave. Sonal framed the role as a bridge between brand vision and talent culture. Rohit Ohri summed it up: “The CCO today isn’t the loudest in the room but the one who builds safe, collaborative spaces”.
Next, Amazon MX Player’s Karan Bedi spotlighted the streaming surge. With over 1.4 billion downloads and 250 million active users, MX is doubling down on drama, romance, and reality content across Amazon platforms. “Streaming video ads are outperforming other formats in brand recall”, Bedi noted, predicting digital video advertising will eclipse TV within a year. He laid out a full-funnel strategy integrating shopping signals, micro-dramas and show-based storytelling to help brands find their tribe.
The attention then shifted outdoors in the IOAA-backed panel ‘The Last Unskippable Medium’. Times OOH’s Shekhar Narayanaswami noted, “You can’t swipe past a billboard”. Ajay Kakar called for killing the ‘digital vs non-digital’ binary. Promita Saha urged brands to go beyond metros, tapping cultural hotspots like melas. Sandeep Bommireddi argued that digital is a horizontal layer across all media. Dipankar Sanyal closed with a reminder: “OOH isn’t guesswork anymore. It’s data-backed, measurable and fiercely effective”.
In a lighter yet no-nonsense fireside chat titled ‘Why So Serious?’, Gautam Gambhir disarmed the crowd with brutal honesty. “10,000 runs don’t matter. Match-winning moments define you”, he said. Speaking on leadership and legacy, Gambhir urged youth to make peace with mistakes: “If you take a decision with the right intent, it’s okay to be wrong”. His message: play for the common man, not the broadcaster.
The storytelling baton passed to ‘Rewriting the Rules of Storytelling’ featuring Suniel Shetty and Deepak Dhar. Shetty spoke of action, discipline and emotional arcs. “Fitness isn’t just muscles, it’s sustainable health”, he said, describing Hunter Season 2 as more heart than hammer. Dhar unpacked Rise and Fall as a metaphorical hustle between privilege and grit. “Great content is built on process and passion”, he said.
The day wound down with Wine & Cheese hosted by Amazon MX Player, followed by a musical showdown at ‘Advertising Rocks’, giving agency folks their moment to rock the mic. Delegates gathered for a breezy sundowner powered by Truecaller & Big Live before the night turned up with Abby Awards 2025. Set India, Sony Sab and Sharechat handed out honours in digital, design, PR, mobile, and broadcaster categories.
Masterclasses by Shahad Anand (MediaKart), Sana Shaikh (Flipkart), Nick Eagleton (D&AD), and Senthil Kumar (VML) provided hands-on insights into next-gen ads, innovation pipelines, storytelling craft, and split-second narratives.
As Goa’s salty breeze cooled the creative heat, day two proved that in a world of scrolls and skips, stories, strategy and serendipity still rule the game.
Stay tuned as Goafest 2025 enters its final day. For the day three agenda, visit: https://www.goafest.com/goafest2025/event-schedule.php
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.
