MAM
JWT’s Davis urges ad men to think out-of-the-box
MUMBAI: Advertising needs to stop interrupting what people are interested in and start becoming what people are interested in. That was the premise of JWT Worldwide creative head honcho Craig Davis’ presentation, who is in India currently.
The presentation titled “The 31st Second” was made by Davis in Mumbai on 25 May and was well attended by clients as well as creative heads.
Creative guys such as Mike Khanna, Ranjan Kapoor, John Goodman, Colvyn Harris and Ajay Chandwani from the agencies and Bharat Ranga (Zee) and Albert Almeida (Max) were present from the client’s side. Also present was JWT Asia Pacific area director Patrick Pitcher.
Davis began his presentation by saying that this was the most exciting times for anyone to be in advertising because the appetite of the audience is changing dramatically and also because technology is making new things possible. One more interesting reason he pointed out was that a lot of things that earlier used to work well with audiences were not working as well now, which in turn meant that creative people had to become more inventive, competitive, imaginative and original.
“One proposed shift occurring is that consumers have never had a higher measure of control before. That is one reason why creative people have to be more human and instinctive as that is how audience respond to the work we do,” Davis says.
He stressed on the fact that it was time to move away from the age of interruption to the age of engagement. “The choice of more and more brands and also as many creative agencies are increasing consumers’ choice to pick and choose. This range of change is not going to settle down as the only thing constant is yet more change,” stresses Davis.
Furthermore he went on to say that communication only works at its best when there is a great idea backing it. “There is a lot of scope for agencies to show their creativity as there are many big clients with major work who are there in the market. There are huge confluences at work now as a lot of clients are hungry for success,” he adds.
Emphasizing on the fact that as new technology like TiVo and DVRs, which allows people to watch television programmes at their own convenient time, are making their presence felt in the international market; the ads will tend to get avoided. “In North America, 60 per cent of programmes are watched at a time different from the original telecast time. Also, 92 per cent of ads today are skipped. The situation is quite different in India, but it won’t take time to change,” Davis says.
In today’s hectic life, people hardly have the time for ads and hence they tend to ignore it. What advertising should try and do is stimulate people by what regulators will allow. People have a lot on their minds and hence tend to ignore the messages that they are bombarded with every waking minute of the day.
“The consumer is dead. Advertising objectifies people and they have a lot of control over us and what we do. Hence the focus should be to treat the consumer as our new client,” Davis says.
The whole idea should be to create work that would resonate much beyond the duration of telecast on television and radio. The same goes for print and outdoor too. The ultimate aim being to become the thing that people are interested in.
Citing JWT’s role, Davis says that the aim was to get more people to spend more time with their clients’ brands. The agency’s purpose, on the other hand was to create ideas that people would want to spend more time with. And finally, the agency’s belief was that the better the idea, the more time people would spend with it.
Concluding the presentation, Davis made an interesting analogy between advertising agencies and the newspaper industry. He said that both believed that the world was waiting to hear what they had to say.
Unfortunately, that is not the case. “We have to explore the possibilities in new mediums and think of most effective and interesting ways to capture audiences’ attention,” he says.
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.
