MAM
Percept/H rolls out the next phase of Bharat Nirman Campaign
MUMBAI: The second phase of the Bharat Nirman Campaign is out and it has been received well by everyone. The ad has been conceptualised by Percept/H.
These films are produced and filmed by Pradeep Sarkar and his Apocolypso Filmworks team.
In the first phase of the campaign, the creative agency has created seven TVCs focusing on citizen‘s rights launched last year. This year, the agency is coming up with six TVCs.
This time, the TV commercials will be focused on the education, secularism, infrastructure, mobile, telephone, government schemes and policies. A thematic film that ties them all together is also part of the mix.
The campaign will be promoted via television, cinema halls and print. The TV commercials will be focused on the revolutionary schemes that have been launched over the past few years. The team at Percept/H focused on people-driven stories and treated the campaign like they would do a regular brand campaign.
Percept/H executive creative director Rajiv Agarwal said, “This is a people’s campaign, people’s point-of-view. The idea was to translate the brief/schemes into people stories in a classic storytelling format so that people engaged and identified with the campaign. And why should ‘sarkari work look sarkari?’ The whole idea was to treat it like any other brand campaign, so that when the govt logo appears at the end, it should be a surprise. There’s an insight behind every story. The motive behind these TVCs to make the protagonist and hence the consumer feel empowered.”
Percept/H VP Kausar Anjum said, “We talked about the difference one could make to one’s life through the proper utilization of these schemes, irrespective of whether its urban or rural India. As always the logistical challenges of executing the TVCs were immense: five TVCs and one overarching TVC, four language masters for each. Making it a total of 24 master films and dubs in seven languages of each film, making it 35 dubs. So at the end their will be 59 films.”
Percept/H has won the creative duties of Bharat Nirman, the campaign initiated by the central government for the development of rural India in a multi-agency pitch which was held in July 2012.
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.
