MAM
Leo Burnett ropes in Hitesh Mehta as VP
MUMBAI: After a slew of significant senior level appointments, Leo Burnett India has announced the appointment of Hitesh Mehta as vice president to be based at its head office in Mumbai.
Mehta will be leading McDonald’s business nationally on both account management and strategy.
Leo Burnett India CEO Saurabh Varma said, “With over a decade of integrated communications experience, Hitesh is extremely passionate about understanding human behaviour and applying those valuable insights to client work. It is this very orientation that is of great value to our strong HumanKind philosophy for our brands.”
Over the years Mehta has worked in differing local, regional and global roles on some of the world’s biggest brands based out of India, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia.
His last assignment was with Leo Burnett in Indonesia, wherein he was a part of the agency leadership team, successfully delivering on his mandate to partner the marketing teams at Dutch Lady and McDonalds, in pursuit of achieving their growth ambitions within the Indonesian market. Always on the lookout for new challenges, Mehta relocated back to India in 2013 and has been working as an independent brand consultant prior to joining Leo Burnett earlier this month.
Mehta said, “The QSR market is still quite nascent and there is immense scope for growth. It’s a very exciting time for McDonalds and I am relishing the opportunity.”
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.
