MAM
IMG acquires Australian fashion firm
MUMBAI: Sports and lifestyle management and marketing firm IMG has signed an agreement to acquire Australian Fashion Innovators (AFI) and with it the fashion event, Mercedes Australian Fashion Week.
The acquisition also includes the management and production of the Mercedes-Benz Start Up program in Australia and New Zealand, the Mercedes-Benz Asia Fashion Award programme which is currently held in six countries throughout Asia, the Singapore Fashion Festival and other fashion events around the Asia Pacific region that are in development, including events in India, China and Japan.
Australian Fashion Innovators former CEO Simon P. Lock will be the MD of the newly formed IMG Fashion Asia Pacific .
IMG currently owns and operates a number of the fashion events. These include Olympus Fashion Week (New York ), Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Smashbox Studios (Los Angeles ), Fashion Fringe (London). In India IMG produces the Lakme India Fashion Week. It also owns and publishes the magazineThe Daily in New York.
IMG Fashion Asia Pacific will operate initially from four offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore and Hong Kong. The Sydney office will continue to share the offices of The Lock Group, which owned AFI. The Melbourne office will be based at IMG Australia’s corporate offices in St. Kilda Road, St. Kilda. All existing AFI staff will be involved in the new venture and the transition, and will join with IMG staff to work with current sponsors of the events and suppliers, maintain relationships with designers, retailers, the media and the Australian industry in general.
Lock says, “This new venture will benefit from the combination of the experience, expertise and networks of both IMG and my former AFI team. It is the best thing to happen to the Australian fashion industry since Mercedes Australian Fashion Week was first established in 1996. It means that our events and our industry will now benefit through the international alignment of an organisation that owns and has relationships with other international fashion weeks on the circuit. For Australian designers this will mean new opportunities for growth. For MAFW it means increased marketing influence globally.”
IMG Fashion Asia Pacific will provide focussed resources to grow the Asia Pacific fashion industry through a number of initiatives, while adding value to existing ventures and events. The new company will position itself as the most professional, creative and connected fashion event and fashion media content developer in the Asia Pacific.
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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.
