MAM
Lowe Lintas & Partners wins big at AMES
MUMBAI: Lowe Lintas & Partners India continues its great run on effectiveness at yet another awards show – Asian Marketing Effectiveness & Strategy Awards, held in Singapore recently. The agency’s work on ‘Lifebuoy – Help a Child Reach 5’for its client Hindustan Unilever Limited bagged the enviable Platinum award (Effectiveness category) at the prestigious award show.
Apart from the coveted award, Lowe Lintas & Partners India also won the Gold in Effectiveness – Food Products for their work on Kissan ‘100% Natural Seeded’ for HUL. The same entry also won a Bronze in Effective – Innovative Use of Media category. The agency also bagged a Silver under the Effective – Integrated Marketing Campaign category for its work on ‘Lifebuoy Help A Child Reach 5.
Commenting on the win, Lowe Lintas & Partners CEO Joseph George said, “This performance of Lowe Lintas + Partners and Unilever is our best ever at AMEs. For either of us. This reflects our shared belief in what makes for effective communication.”
The performance at AMES follows Lowe Lintas & Partners’ fine achievement in April 2014 where it was named the most Effective Indian Agency at the APAC EFFIEs Awards 2014. The agency had bagged 4 metals including 2 Golds, a Sliver and a Bronze out of total 6 metals for India. Lowe Lintas & Partners was also bestowed the ‘Agency of the Year’ title at Indian Effies 2013.
Lowe Lintas & Partners CMO Vikas Mehta said, “We had entered a small number of campaigns this year at the AMEs. Four wins including the all-important platinum is remarkable. I’m told it’s the country’s first AME platinum on effectiveness. That sure feels nice.”
The Asian Marketing Effectiveness and Strategy Awards are Asia Pacific’s foremost awards honoring clients and their agencies for marketing strategies that deliver solid results to transform businesses and brands. The annual awards are judged by a panel of top client and agency professionals who review the submissions against stringent criteria to determine the winners of the prestigious Asian Marketing Effectiveness and Strategy awards.
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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.
