MAM
Melting to a fabulous show
MUMBAI: After literally ‘Melting’ for two days with sessions going around at all times, Zee Melt 2015 in association with GroupM was a resounding success. Speakers from across the globe flew down to address audiences with their expertise.
Not only that, the event was trending on Twitter on day one. With agencies having workshops and stalls to showcase their work to the masses, Zee Melt 2015 was possibly one of the most memorable events in town.
The two day festival of creativity in advertising and marketing created by Kyoorius in partnership with Zee, GroupM and D&AD offered delegates a plethora of choices of events, such as workshops, seminars, showcases and the main conference.
Kinetic Future Citizens was centred around understanding the consumers of the future – their needs, wants and behaviours. Kinetic Future Citizens engaged the delegates with a different experience. The concept was simple. One had to pedal a cycle and the animation on the TV would start playing. A technology, which understands the future of consumers and the environment.
Meanwhile, Happy Finish created a lot of buzz with its augmented reality experience. It made delegates enter the virtual world in their world and do many things like bring a car alive when it is actually not present.
Metalworks by Maxus, on one hand, through its Provolv Cricket wearable technology kit gave delegates a player performance cricket match experience, while Mindshare had an interactive marketing Purple Box and Loop Room.
The industry appreciated the work and initiatives taken at Zee Melt 2015. Here is a look at what some of them had to say:
Madison World chairman Sam Balsara tells Indiantelevision.com, “I could not attend much of the sessions, but I did attend Martin Sorrell’s and it was a great one. The initiative is a good one and in the near future more and more such events are likely to emerge. It was a fabulous show and I look forward to more years of Melt 2015.”
Ogilvy & Mather former ECD Abhijit Awasthi summed it up in two words – “It’s fabulous.”
BBDO India chief creative officer Josy Paul said, “I enjoyed the MELT experience. I attended some of the seminars on Day one and the awards night on Day two. I thought the turnout and energy was fantastic. Great idea to have it at the Nehru centre. Never realized the place had so many auditoriums and seminar rooms. This created an integrated well knit feeling. It also helped that the location was close to our office.”
He adds, “The teams from our office who attended both the days were singing praises of the workshops.They are keen to cascade their learning to the rest of the office. Congratulations to the organizers for bringing together such a diverse set of speakers across so many different disciplines and fields of communication and technology. What’s great is that these new influences are people, ideas and actions that we are not exposed to sitting in our offices. So the interactions were most rewarding.”
Advertising Club chief operating officer Bipin Pandit said, “We are eventually from the same fraternity and it was a good initiative.”
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.
