MAM
NEXA sponsors SIIMA New Streaming Academy Awards 2024
Mumbai: Maruti Suzuki India Ltd (MSIL) is delighted to declare the continuation of its NEXA alliance with the South Indian International Movie Awards (SIIMA) as it steps into the second consecutive year of sponsorship. This year, NEXA is thrilled to unveil the Streaming Academy Awards 2024, an innovative platform designed to honour India’s rapidly evolving digital content creation sphere. As NEXA forges ahead into another year of partnership, the initiative serves as a powerful symbol of its dedication to nurturing innovation and creativity. The NEXA Streaming Academy Awards 2024 is poised to act as an impetus to recognize and celebrate the exceptional storytellers, pioneering influencers, and impactful content creators who have significantly influenced the digital domain.
Maruti Suzuki India Ltd senior executive officer, marketing & sales Partho Banerjee said, “The NEXA Streaming Academy Awards are not just an award ceremony, they are a celebration of digital creativity and a beacon for the future of entertainment. By honouring the remarkable talent emerging from the digital realm, we aim to inspire and empower the next generation of storytellers. Together with SIIMA, we are pioneering a new era of storytelling where the possibilities are endless, and inspiration knows no bounds. These awards embody our shared commitment to nurturing creativity and innovation. We are thrilled to embark on this journey and look forward to witnessing the extraordinary stories that will unfold.”
Speaking on the collaboration, Brinda Prasad Adusumilli, Chairperson SIIMA, says, “Post-pandemic, digital has become the primary source of content consumption, and content consumption on streaming platforms has become language agnostic. We at SIIMA believe in building an event celebrating the best of streaming platforms irrespective of the language in which the content is produced. We are happy to partner with NEXA in this new initiative as NEXA strongly believes in celebrating excellence”.
Embodying NEXA’s philosophy of ‘Create. Inspire’ these Streaming Academy Awards will not only honour outstanding achievements across diverse Indian languages and platforms but also foster a thriving ecosystem that encourages creators to push boundaries, experiment with formats, and connect with audiences in unprecedented ways. The award will have 24 categories across themes.
The Awards will be held on 21 July 2024 and all the streaming platforms and the producers can send their entries for nomination through the official website streamingacademy.in by 14 June 2024. The jurors of the awards will include renowned industry veterans.a
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.
