MAM
Prism launches ‘Rising OYO’ branding drive across 500 hotels
Campaign targets top 5 tourist states with iconic red logo refresh and large-format signage.
MUMBAI: Rising OYO just gave hotels a neon-red glow-up because when travellers spot that circle from the highway, even the GPS starts whispering “you’ve arrived.” Prism (Parent of OYO) has rolled out ‘Rising OYO’, a nationwide visibility campaign that will rebrand 500 OYO hotels across 20 high-priority cities in India’s five most visited states in 2024-25: Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan. The pilot has already begun at 50 properties in key locations including Lucknow, Varanasi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Jaipur and Hyderabad, with encouraging early results.
The initiative features prominent large-format OYO branding on façades, rooftops and outdoor signage, reviving the brand’s iconic circular red logo to boost instant recognition in dense urban centres, highways and travel corridors. The campaign also covers business hubs such as Delhi-NCR and major religious destinations including Rishikesh, Amritsar, Puri and Ayodhya.
Prism chief operating officer for India Varun Jain said, “By bringing back OYO’s iconic red circular branding at scale, we are strengthening on-ground visibility for our hotel partners while making it easier for travellers to instantly recognise and trust the brand. As religious tourism, short getaways and workations continue to rise, this campaign positions OYO as a brand fully equipped to cater to instant travel decisions.”
Domestic air passenger traffic reached 153 million in 2025, up 12 per cent year-on-year, according to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, driven by improved connectivity, religious travel and flexible work patterns. Against this backdrop, Rising OYO aims to drive higher brand recall, walk-in discovery and booking uplift while supporting hotel partners with better demand generation.
In a travel market where first sight often decides first booking, PRISM isn’t just painting hotels red, it’s turning them into beacons that shout “OYO” long before the traveller even checks the app.
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.
