MAM
Publicis strengthens content practice with key hire Urvashi Khanna
MUMBAI: Publicis Media India has strengthened its Content Practice with a key hire in the form of Urvashi Khanna. She has joined as Associate Director, Content & Brand Solutions and will report in to the Content Practice Lead Gautham Pingali.
The Content Practice provides across the board solutions on content in the area of strategy, insight, consulting, audit, production, tech, partnerships and publishing. It spans all forms of content, be it brand content, social content, influencer content or SEO content.
What differentiates the Practice is its approach to Content. For Publicis Media, Content delivers against core marketing KPI’s and business challenges. The Practice uses a proprietary data-driven approach called Content Audit and then the output fuels the actual content and brand solutions. This is all tied back towards ROI, therefore offering clients a holistic and tangible approach towards content.
Urvashi Khanna has been producing and writing for television for many years. She started her own production house and successfully promo launched many big shows on leading GEC channels. She also produced TVCs and digital ads for brands. She successfully collaborated with Spykar to produce ‘India’s first web series’. Apart from running her own company, she has creatively helmed many shows and has run film and television sets in different capacities. As a Creative Director, she has executed various shows, documentaries and web series and has explored branded content both as digital brand solutions and short form programming.
Gautham Pingali, Content Practice Lead at Publicis Media India, says, “Urvashi is a fantastic addition to the team. With her strong background in storytelling and production, she is the apt fit for this role and we are delighted to welcome her on-board.”
Urvashi Khanna says, “We live in very interesting times. Brands are beginning to feel the need to go beyond the clutter of everyday commercials. My role gives me the unique opportunity to create content that is both engaging and accountable. I am very excited to be a part of Publicis Media India.”
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.
