AD Agencies
Maddys 2025 goes global, gets glossier
MUMBAI: The Advertising Club Madras is bringing the heat with the 43rd edition of Maddys, giving India’s longest-running advertising awards a slick new sheen – and a global passport. This year’s rebooted avatar doesn’t just honour great work, it redefines the very format with new categories, a heavyweight jury, a transparent scoring system, and an international welcome mat.
Themed ‘AI vs AI – Awesome Ideas vs Awesome Ideas’, Maddys 2025 goes all in on the creative wars in a tech-saturated world – and the stakes are high.
For starters, it’s going international. The awards will now invite entries from across borders, aligning themselves with global benchmarks. With 155 categories across six streams – Creative, Digital, Media, Design & Print Craft, Film & Audio Craft, and Regional Pride (Tamil) – this isn’t just a celebration, it’s a campaign for creative excellence.
The 2025 edition also introduces Grand Prix honours, a one-day celebration that starts with breakfast and ends with a cocktail, and a robust, two-tiered judging system scored on Strategy & Insights, Originality & Creativity, and Execution & Impact – minus the fluff of performance metrics.
The dream jury team includes:
. Karthi Marshan, former Kotak CMO, and Senthil Kumar of VML India co-chairing Creative MADDYS
. Ajay Gupte of Wavemaker chairing Media
. Dr. Apurva Chamaria of Google helming Digital
. Filmmaking duo Gayatri & Pushkar chairing Film & Audio Craft
. Santosh Padhi of Into Creative on Design & Print Craft duty
. Chocka of OPN taking charge of Regional Pride Maddys
Process czar Gokul Krishnamoorthy returns as honorary jury convenor and process auditor, ensuring the judging stays squeaky clean and crystal clear.
Aside from bragging rights, agencies and clients can win titles across streams. Grand Prix winners bag 30 points, with Gold (15), Silver (7), Bronze (3), and Shortlists (1) rounding out the leaderboard — all contributing to the prestigious “Agency of the Year” and “Client of the Year” crowns across categories.
From art directors to Tamil-language storytellers, from global digital campaigns to handcrafted print ideas — Maddys 2025 isn’t just turning up the volume, it’s tuning into the future. Ready, set, pitch.
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.
