MAM
Pantene Brand ambassador Katrina Kaif in new ad campaign
MUMBAI: Having done a number of short term assignments already with Pantene, Bollywood hopeful Katrina Kaif has now been signed on as the official brand ambassador of the shampoo major.
Katrina will appear in a new advertising blitz featuring a new finding: ’80 per cent of India’s most beautiful women prefer Pantene’, it was announced today. The data has been culled form a recent study on ‘Hair Care Practices of India’s Most Beautiful Women’ conducted by market research major ACNielsen in association with magazine “Cosmopolitan”. Katrina joins Pantene’s league of past celebrity endorses which includes Sonali Bendre, Bipasha Basu, Shilpa Shetty, Amrita Rao, Anupama Verma and Tara Deshpande.
Chester Twigg, Director – Sales and Marketing, (P&G India) said, “…we have signed her (Katrina) on as Pantene’s official brand ambassador. She will appear in an ad campaign featuring the finding ’80 per cent of India’s Most Beautiful Women prefer Pantene’ – a re-affirmation of Pantene being a shampoo of choice.”
ACNielsen was commissioned to carry out a study on “Hair Care Practices of India’s Most Beautiful Women” during the period September – December 2004. The first phase of the study entailed a house-to-house quantitative study among 1,000 respondents across ten metro towns to identify the 100 most beautiful women in India from the field of performing arts.
In the second phase Cosmopolitan magazine helped ACNielsen contact a sample of 100 most beautiful women identified in phase one for telephonic interviews conducted by ACNielsen on aspects such as: importance of hair in one’s personality; their personal hair tips; opinions and preference among leading premium* beauty shampoos (priced at Rs.50/- & above for 100 ml). To avoid any bias ACNielsen did not interview women with existing endorsement contracts for any beauty brands, including those of P&G. Subsequent to the interviews, one of the findings that emerged was “80 per cent of India’s Most Beautiful Women prefer Pantene.”
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.
