MAM
Pocket Aces elevates Vinay Pillai to head of strategy
MUMBAI: Homegrown digital entertainment company, Pocket Aces, has elevated Vinay Pillai to the dual position of head of strategy and head of clout. Vinay joined Pocket Aces in 2020 to scale Clout, its influencer management business, and has played a crucial role in getting it to a leadership position.
In this enhanced role, Vinay will work on establishing key strategic partnerships that will not only aid in scaling the current revenue and profitability but also cement Pocket Aces’ leadership position in the sector long-term. Prior to Pocket Aces, Vinay was the co-founder of dekkho, India’s first content streaming OTT platform. Post dekkho, he headed the OTT platform at The Viral Fever, called TVF Play.
Vinay is a computer science engineer and an MS from Columbia University, New York. He spent most of his career in product and strategy consulting with companies like DramaFever, DocPlace, and Booz in the US before returning to India.
Commenting on his new position, Vinay Pillai shared, “I am extremely excited to take up this crucial additional responsibility to shape our strategic direction along with Aditi. Leading Clout over the last few years has been an absolute pleasure, and I have thoroughly enjoyed building it from scratch to a market leader today with an amazing team. Additionally, I look forward to now working with Pocket Aces’ finest leaders across other business units to help them scale our company to even greater heights. We have prided ourselves on always doing things in a data-backed way with a huge impetus on innovation. I feel honoured to now get to contribute in a Pocket Aces wide central capacity with our stellar young team and would like to thank Aditi for the opportunity.”
Pocket Aces co-founder & CEO Aditi Shrivastava said, “For the head of strategy role, I wanted someone who would work alongside me to add to our vision of taking our cutting-edge media business to the next level. Vinay is a non-linear thinker. He has founder blood, as well as a blend of consulting and operational experience. These give him a unique vantage point on how to take on incumbents while also giving him the hard operational expertise of scaling businesses on the ground with growing teams. Vinay has done an excellent job of scaling Clout, and I’m excited to see him in this enhanced role. Vinay will be working closely with the rest of our management team, who will take the lead in putting our strategic direction into action.”
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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.
