MAM
Prakash Nathan starts his entrepreneurial journey with CineMArkets
Mumbai : Former UTV Disney India operations head and Vice president at UTV Motion Pictures Prakash Nathan is all set to roll out with his new venture CineMArkets Digital Solutions Private Limited. Along with co-founders Girish Kumar and Inkswipe Consulting LLP, Prakash Nathan’s new project is India’s first and very own digital market place for the media and entertainment industry that aims to eradicate the loopholes of the rapidly growing film industry by engaging the content creators, producers and the vendors & service providers under one umbrella. CineMArkets is a dynamic new-age digital platform, which will thrive to engulf the entire media and entertainment industry with its B2B and B2C offerings. As a part of its B2B services, CineMArkets will be a platform, which unifies all stakeholders of the M&E spectrum including content creators and content producers.
The platform will help to transform the current production cycles by bringing in transparency and aid in reducing wastage at multiple stages, eventually making it more profitable for the producer. The process is promised to be as simple as, anyone can visit the portal and help himself with the requirements to create any Media and Entertainment related profile. There is also a revenue model fashioned in a way that will help filmmakers to reduce the waste, instead gain out of it.
Joining hands in this mammoth of an initiative is Inkswipe Consuting LLP, the renowned experts in building such platforms for media, finance and technology, famous for their projects such as Mid-day, Bollywood Hungama, Kolkata Knight Riders, Red chillies and Football Club Pune city.
Describing his just launched brainchild, which is in its Beta stage, Prakash shares, “It’s a market place for Media & Entertainment on the web that will enable sourcing capabilities for producers, line producers and content creators. It will not only facilitate creation, production but also syndication and the entire value chain of film and television content creation. Our mission is to enable seamless media creation, convergence and consumption. We, at CineMArkets, are really excited and sure that this venture will revolutionize the M&E industry.”
With a strong team that consists of media influencers and terrific media managers who have been veterans in the entertainment industry, CineMArkets is sure to ring all the right bells and become the household name for a majority of Indian families.
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.
