MAM
NavinTheeng has joined Havas Worldwide as Executive Creative Director, Gurgaon
MUMBAI: NavinTheeng has joined Havas Worldwide as Executive Creative Director, Gurgaon. He moves from Cheil Worldwide, Gurgaon where he was Group Creative Director leading a team handling Samsung mobiles, televisions and home appliances besides other business. Navin replaces the erstwhile ECD team of Nakul Sharma and TirthaGhosh.
“At Havas, we are working towards not just blurring the line between digital and traditional creative but completely erasing it. And a creative leader who is comfortable with and excited by both is what we needed. I think we have found that person in Navin”, said Nima DT Namchu, Chief Creative Officer, Havas Worldwide, India. Theeng will report to Namchu and will be responsible for digital and traditional creative output of Gurgaon office.
Welcoming Navin aboard, Chief Executive Officer, NirmalyaSen said – “Navin’s appointment is a part of our further strengthening of our already robust offering in Gurgaon. Navin brings with him not just an impressive track record as a creative mind, but also a reputation for leading his team to creative excellence. I wish him great success with Havas Worldwide.”
“It’s a bit of a homecoming”, said Theeng. This is his second stint at the agency after a fairly long first stint. “But other than that, everything has changed. Technology was a bit of a bugbear 10 years back, but now the possibilities are endless. You can expect to see more technology-infused ideas coming from Havas.”
In the 18 years he has been in the industry, Navin has worked with Bates, McCann Erickson, Euro RSCG, Rediffusion DY&R, Contract and Cheil handling brands across categories such as consumer durables, colas, airlines, mobile phones, liquor, real estate and sports.
Along the way, he has won accolades at Cannes, The One Show, New York Festival, Spikes Asia and Goafest Abbys with quite a few of the wins in the ‘Integrated Category led by Digital’.
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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.
