MAM
Kotak Securities partners with DAN Data Sciences & Dentsu Webchutney to reinvent Customer Acquisition
MUMBAI: Dentsu Aegis Network’s (DAN) Data Sciences division has collaborated with Dentsu Webchutney to reinvent ‘Customer Acquisition’ for Kotak Securities. The teams have developed MarTech solutions to reach out to potential consumers with DAN Sync. For the record, DAN Sync is a proprietary custom solution built to link CRM with online marketing endeavours.
The consumer journey is no longer linear. While a lot of the journey is completed offline, the online signals are not strong enough. Meanwhile, acquisition of a new prospect has become increasingly expensive, especially in the cluttered BFSI space.
“The better one is able to harness the intelligence of data mines, the better the end numbers look,” believes Kotak Securities EVP and head marketing, products and customer service Jaimit Doshi,
Dentsu Webchutney director media Nishant Malsisaria identifies the problem. He says, “For Kotak Securities’ Trading account offerings, performance campaigns ran on multiple channels online. However, optimization was possible only for first level leads since a large part of the final conversion is done through offline call centers. The resultant marketing strategy assumed focus on high acquisition rates with lesser control over quality leads, since reverse transfer of marketing intelligence was not happening then.”
With Facebook being one of the key platforms of the acquisition strategy, the task at hand for Dentsu Webchutney was to narrow the acquisition funnel by reaching out to the closest prospects for conversion.
Explaining the strategy, chief data officer (South Asia), Dentsu Aegis Network and CEO DAN programmatic Gautam Mehra says, “The problem with the traditional form of digital advertising is that intelligence built offline is not passed back to inform online strategies. Using a custom built product such as DAN Sync that was created to transfer offline learnings for online optimizations, we deployed the globally renowned DAN Data Labs Product Suite – that uses best in class machine learning algorithms – over the hashed data from the client’s CRM to deliver a new benchmark for the industry.”
“Although expected, the results were astounding enough for augmenting the client’s confidence. The tool performed magnificently well, improving the lead to account open ratio by 500%,” adds Mehra.
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.
