MAM
MMA India announces new categories, calls for entries to 2020 SMARTIES awards
MUMBAI: The Mobile Marketing Association has announced new categories for the ninth edition of SMARTIES India Awards 2020, scheduled for September in Mumbai, India. The SMARTIES are the world’s only global mobile marketing awards programme honouring innovation, creativity and success, and MMA is calling for entries to SMARTIES 2020, encouraging agencies, brands, and marketers who have secured outstanding achievements across the mobile marketing ecosystem.
“Technology has become a greater, more integral part of mobile marketing in the past year and continues to be a disruptive force across India. We are pleased to introduce new categories for this year’s SMARTIES Awards. These categories will help expand our reach to new, modern marketing initiatives being undertaken across the country,” said MMA India country head Moneka Khurana. “We are looking forward to receiving this year’s entries and celebrating the excellence of mobile marketing at the annual SMARTIES Awards.”
New categories
On top of existing categories spanning four themes that include marketing objective, media, technology and creative awards, there are four new categories added to this year’s edition. They are:
Data/Insights (Technology): The use of consumer data plays an integral role in the development and execution of a campaign to target, engage or develop a meaningful relationship with a specific audience or community. Entrants need to detail the role that data had within the campaign strategy in achieving the brand and business goals.
Banners and Rich Media (Technology): Driving business goals while being respectful of user experience. This category is relevant to campaigns using mobile platforms and/or devices that encourage customer interaction and engagement and drive strong business ROI. The campaigns also actively seek to be respectful of user experience from the ad choices made.
Best Use of UGC (Creative Awards): User-generated content (UGC) consists of any form of content that’s created by users and consumers about a brand or product. UGC in turn enables authenticity and makes the user the brand ambassador. This is suitable for entrants who have creatively enabled UGC and crowdsourcing to build consumer collaborative ads, yielding great results and metrics.
Best Data-driven Creatives (Creative Awards): Intelligent use of data insights for scaled personalisation of creatives to drive campaign and business objectives. Data insights could be based on audiences, context or from offline input (e.g. pollution API).
Eligibility and deadline
To be eligible for the awards, campaigns need to be active in the marketplace between January 2019 to July 2020. The on-time deadline for all entries is 15 July, while the extended deadline is 24 July. With an extended deadline, there are changes to entry fees as well.
More details about pricing information and entry submission for the 2020 SMARTIES India can be found in the official submission kit here
New programme
Aside from new categories, MMA has also introduced SMARTIES Thailand as a new country programme. There are now six country programmes for the 2020 Asia Pacific SMARTIES. These include SMARTIES India, SMARTIES APAC, SMARTIES Vietnam, SMARTIES China, SMARTIES Indonesia and SMARTIES Thailand.
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.
