MAM
Kodak wins Effie for Olympics ad campaign
MUMBAI: A photo montage created by Eastman Kodak celebrating the citizens of Greece and the return of the Olympic Games to Athens won the Gold Award in its category at the third annual Effie Hellas 2004 Awards.
The Effie Awards are presented annually by the New York American Marketing Association in recognition of the year’s advertising campaigns that have delivered superior results in meeting the objectives they were designed to achieve.
The photo montage titled The Whole of Greece in One Smile comprises of 16,609 photos of the Greek community that cover a surface area of over 5,000 square feet. The montage, situated in the Athens Syntagma Square opposite the Parliament of Greece, was recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest photo montage ever created.
Kodak issued a release stating that it created the montage to honor the citizens of Greece in keeping with the company’s historic association with the Olympics. George Eastman who founded Kodak, began the company’s association with the Games in 1896 – when he placed an advertisement for the Athens Games.
Kodak Near East GM Lazaros Piatopoulos made the following remarks about the endeavour. “We decided to create something that would give all visitors to Athens the chance to share in the spirit of the Olympic Games. The people of Greece were invited to send a picture and be part of history in the largest-ever photographic montage. The photos of the 16,609 Greeks that responded made up the face of a child whose smile looks at the future with hope and awaits the Athens 2004 Olympic Games with pride. . With the theme Golden Past. Brilliant Future we intend to continue to empower the world to share in the Olympic spirit.”
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.
