MAM
Mudra Max ropes in Khanna as media head, west
MUMBAI: Mudra Max has appointed Samir Khanna as the media head — west.
Prior to this appointment, Khanna was in-charge of Mumbai clients for Mudra India.
Khanna will be looking after Mumbai and Ahmedabad clients and will be based out of Mumbai. He will report to Mudra Max CEO Pratap Bose and will also work closely with the other unit heads of Mudra Max.
Mudra Max has recently integrated all the mass media teams as a single unit media in the West as Mudra Max Media.
Khanna has over 13 years of professional experience in media. He started his career with HTA and agencies such as Lodestar, TME and Madison. He has managed HUL brands, ITC, Kodak, Godrej, Parle among others.
Bose said the consolidation of the mass media services will enable us to portray scale and cohesiveness to the industry. “It will leverage our volume of media buys more effectively to add value to existing clients and help us in the acquisition of new businesses. With the new structure, we hope to make Mudra Max Media a force to reckon with in the industry. I wish Samir and the Mudra Max media team loads of success in the year ahead.”
Khanna added, “This is an exciting time at Mudra Max. The consolidation of the mass media offering gives us the required width and we look forward to providing truly integrated media solutions to our clients. I look forward to working closely with the heads of our experiential and non-traditional media offerings to take media from a pure awareness generation role to a function that builds increasing levels of engagement with the consumer at each step of a brand’s marketing efforts.”
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.
