MAM
Mirum hires Preetam Thingalaya as director of media
MUMBAI: Mirum has announced the appointment of Preetam Thingalaya as its director of media. Preetam will head the media planning and buying division and play a key role in growing the business and providing strategic direction, especially focusing on programmatic and performance marketing.
Thingalaya comes with more than two decades of experience across agency businesses, including Mindshare, PHD, and Hungama. His last stint was with OTT platform Zee5 as the digital lead for SVOD and music verticals.
Mirum has a successful media planning and buying division, servicing more than 50 clients across BFSI, healthcare, FMCG, F&B and other sectors. With Thingalaya at the helm, Mirum is looking forward to significantly enhance its digital media planning and buying bouquet of services.
Thingalaya will be based out of the Mumbai office and will directly report to the Jt CEO Sanjay Mehta.
Commenting on Thingalaya’s appointment, Mehta says, “I am delighted to welcome Preetam on-board. Mirum offers a full-service solution to clients, from strategy, creative, technology, content, monitoring, and marketing automation, and paid digital media is an integral and critical component, to join the dots and deliver business results, for our clients. At Mirum, we already have a very successful media planning and buying division, and now with Preetam coming on board, we will provide enhanced value across all facets of paid digital media, further strengthening our media deliveries.”
Thingalaya enthusiastically adds, “I am super excited to join the Mirum family and look forward to contributing towards the success of the organisation.”
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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.
