MAM
GREY Group merges with Autumn Grey
MUMBAI: GREY, one of India’s leading creative agencies has merged with AutumnGrey – a digital/data companies. The company has announced a new structure and go to market strategy in India. Autumn Grey CEO Anusha Shetty, a digital-first leader & trailblazer, has been appointed as GREY Group India’s chairman & group CEO.
Shetty is known for her relentless passion in developing and driving client business. Under her leadership, Autumn Grey has delivered several ground-breaking and award-winning online and digital campaigns that have firmly established Autumn Grey as one of India’s premier digital agencies. Her leadership and management skills, along with her digital knowledge are second to none.
With more than 20 years of marketing and advertising experience, and a career spanning across India and Silicon Valley, Shetty has co-founded Autumn Worldwide, a hyper-specialised digital marketing firm with offerings such as digital creative outreach, big data listening & insights, business intelligence, online reputation management, command centre management, media planning and buying and technology development.
Prior to this, Shetty has held progressive assignments in agencies like Lowe and Euro RSCG, working on multiple brands including Intel, Titan, Unilever, Honeywell, to name just a few.
Shetty will work closely with Nirvik Singh to ensure a seamless transition of leadership as they combine the creative strength of GREY with data-driven digital solutions from Autumn Grey, to create a future-facing agency model and framework.
Anusha Shetty said, “Convergence as a topic is not new. But to see this in action, driving value for our clients and our end consumers, is a dream for all of us. The breakdown of communication silos is the only way to create a future agency model and I am delighted to lead this journey with Sandipan.”
“Anusha is one of those unique talents who possess a rare combination of digital & social media knowledge along with entrepreneurial flair & business acumen. She is a natural-born leader who along with her team will bring ideal digital, creative and business solutions to clients across various industries. I think with her wealth of experience, she is the right person to take the agency to the next level. This is very much a game-changing moment for GREY India,” said GREY Group global COO and GREY AMEA chairman & CEO Nirvik Singh.
Sandipan Bhattacharyya who has been promoted as the GREY Group India’s managing director (MD) & chief creative officer (CCO), has led the agency to win multiple lions at Cannes, India’s first D&AD Yellow Pencil in Design, a grand prix and over a dozen metals at spikes, Adfest, one show and several Effies. In addition, he has played a major creative role in all of the agency’s big business wins.
The newly created role of the creative leader as MD signals GREY’s vision of putting creative front and centre of its growth story. As MD & CCO of GREY India, Bhattacharyya will be responsible for driving GREY’s mandate of famously effective work to the next level.
GREY’s creative work is rooted in pop culture and under his leadership GREY has launched some of the most iconic campaigns in the last decade.
Bhattacharyya has more than 20 years of experience in advertising, prior to GREY he has worked at BBDO India, Enterprise Nexus and Saatchi & Saatchi.
“Sandipan is extremely talented and has been instrumental in taking GREY’s creativity to a global level. His creative direction & storytelling expertise is a conversation starter and his campaigns are found in the middle of pop culture. With a dual approach of creative and digital working in unison, GREY is in the right place to create more ground-breaking, famously effective work for its clients,” said Nirvik Singh.
Sandipan said, “It’s the perfect blend of creativity, technology and data that’s happening at GREY and I’m lucky to be leading in these exciting times. Anusha and I are both intensely creative beings who think of ideas as a business multiplier, and we’re cooking up a hot new sauce. Watch this space or better still, give us a call”
GREY India current CEO Yashaswini Samat will be relocating to Singapore to take up a senior integrated role for WPP/GREY. She will continue to report to Singh.
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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.
