MAM
Grey creates Network18’s corporate campaign
MUMBAI: Grey Worldwide- Mumbai has created the new corporate campaign for Network18 titled ‘Red Tag‘. It has been directed by filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee.
Grey India national creative director Malvika Mehra said, “The task very simply was to introduce Network18 to the world and explain the role it plays in impacting people‘s lives. We wanted to create something for Network18 that ‘connects‘ with the consumer. We did this in a very simple way. We took an element from the Network18 logo itself – ‘the red tag‘ and had some fun with it.
“The brief was simple enough, but fitting all the pieces together in a script wasn‘t, believe me! We knew we wanted to be about omnipresence, we knew we had to be fresh, but above all we were sure we didn‘t want a stiff conventional, corporate approach,” Grey Mumbai senior ECD Rohit Malkani said.
“Rather than have Network18 do a little chest thumping exercise, it made more sense to have people discover for themselves how big they really are. And that was the genesis for the ‘red tag‘ game,” Mehra added.
The agency has used ‘BachkeRehna‘ track from Pukaar in an attempt to bring alive India and its people, whose lives Network 18 touches.
The film begins in a regular looking office where a man shakes his head incredulously as he announces that the ‘rupee is 56 to the dollar‘. Suddenly he finds a female colleague rushing towards him with a red sticky tag/note, which she slaps on to his chest. He is surprised at first then realises why she did that as he checks the CNBC moneycontrol page on his phone. To his surprise he now sees her surfing some deals on Homeshop 18.com. In a ‘counter move‘, he rushes to her with glee and slaps her back with a red tag.
And so it begins…a random, fun and exciting game where people across India tag each other with Red Tags each time they are touched by Network18. A young girl is tagged by her father because she pushes away her dinner plate after seeing a report on Anna, a boy is tagged by his friends after he lets out a volley of abuses at their neighbour, a grandmother is tagged by her granddaughter who spies her watching BalikaVadhu and dabbing her eyes etc. The film ends after a series of rapid tags with a voice over that highlights the penny drop moment. “If you were tagged for every way that we touched your life. This is what your world would look like. This is Network18. The life in your day.”
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.
