MAM
Karbonn Mobiles gets title sponsorship of Champions League T20 for Rs 150 mn
NEW DELHI: ESPN Star Sports, the commercial rights holder of Champions League Twenty20, has got Rs 150 million from handset manufacturer Karbonn Mobiles which has come in as title sponsor of the 2012 edition of the tournament.
The value of the deal is almost the same as Nokia had paid last year but much lower than Airtel‘s five-year deal for Rs 1.70 billion. Airtel had ended its title sponsorship deal after two years, realising that the Champions League Twenty20 (CLT20) event is yet to catch the fancy of the audiences.
As part of the new deal, Karbonn Mobiles will have rights to on-ground title sponsorship with all its entitlements. The tournament will now be called Karbonn Champions League Twenty20.
“We have paid Rs 150 million for the one-year deal,” a source in Karbonn Mobiles said.
The handset manufacturer is also negotiating with ESS for broadcast sponsorship. Karbonn Mobiles chairman Sudhir Hasija said, “The association with CLT20 is a matter of great pride for Karbonn Mobiles and it gives us a platform to create constructive fan engagement and, thus, generate a buzz around the brand Karbonn and the Brand CLT20.”
The handset brand is also the associate on-ground sponsor of Indian Premier League (IPL). Karbonn is currently on the negotiating table with BCCI on the deal which expired with season 5 of the IPL.
ESPN Star Sports is in negotiations to rope in other sponsors for the event. ESPN Software India managing director Aloke Malik said that the tournament this year is likely to draw in more viewership as there will be participation from four IPL teams and teams from Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Karbonn will leverage CLT20 sponsorship by utilising the 360 degree communication mix with a focus on TV, print, digital and press.
For CLT20, Karbonn will extend the ‘Karbonn Smart‘ brand extension offering new range of technologically advanced products along with a complete range of smart-feature phone segment as well.
The fourth edition of the Champions League Twenty20 will feature a total of 14 teams and 29 matches across four venues – Centurion, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.
Karbonn Mobiles is looking at investing in sports properties beyond cricket such as hockey and boxing. “We have earmarked Rs 2 billion towards marketing this year,” said Karbonn Mobiles managing director Pradeep Jain.
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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.
