AD Agencies
Havas Media Group India wins integrated media AOR of Yepme.com
MUMBAI: The year has surely started with a good note for Havas Media group. After being graded at No.1 in YTD new business achievements in both the RECMA 2013 Compitches preliminary reports, the agency has won the Integrated Media AOR for Yepme.com India.
The account is estimated to be upwards of Rs 50 crores annually.
Havas Media Group, India and South Asia CEO Anita Nayyar explained, “We have just completed a successful year and Yepme.com has added another feather to our cap. It is a young and growing company and we gave them a differentiated and targeted approach to deliver the core message. We are extremely delighted to work with their forward thinking team.”
“Yepme.com being the first win of the year is always special, we will continue with our effort to deliver value to our existing clients and keep growing the new business organization”, added Havas Media India MD Mohit Joshi.
Speaking on the appointment, Yepme.com co-founder Sandeep Sharma said, “Havas Media had a keen understanding of our audience and business. They have specialist divisions like Mobext to handle the mobile advertising which is so very critical to us. Besides all this, the sheer passion of the team made us choose them as our media partners.”
In December 2012, Forbes India magazine ranked Yepme.com as one of the top five start-ups to watch out for. In February 2014, Stylophane ranked fashion brands across the world on social index where Yepme ranked 19th worldwide.
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.
