MAM
Mars Wrigley India appoints new General Manager
MUMBAI: Mars Wrigley has announced that Kalpesh Parmar has been appointed General Manager for India with effect from January 9. Kalpesh will be based in the Gurgaon office and will become a member of Mars Wrigley’s Global
tudies, Kalpesh is a seasoned business leader with 21 years of experience in consumer industry spanning across South Korea, Singapore, Dubai, Turkey, Nigeria and India, with specific focus on business development, brand building, route to market, e-commerce and capability building.
Emerging Markets Leadership Team.
Kalpesh succeeds Andrew Leakey, who has moved to Australia as General Manager.
An alumnus of Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management S Kalpesh has been associated with Unilever for the past 12 years and was most recently designated as the CEO for South Korea, Pacific Islands and Mongolia, and he also managed the Ice Cream business in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Prior to this, he was designated as the Global Customer Collaboration Director based out of Singapore. He was the member of Global Customer Development team and was responsible for managing 30 customer insight and innovation centers across the Globe. He was driving the joint business planning process for developed and emerging markets for Top 40 markets. At Unilever Nigeria, he was leading the Shopper & Customer Marketing agenda, supporting customer marketing and modern trade development for Sub Saharan Africa. Kalpesh has also worked with Gillette and Marico in India prior to Unilever.
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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.
