MAM
Push Integrated to handle creative biz of Celebrity Cricket League
MUMBAI: Celebrity Cricket League (CCL) has awarded its creative duties to Push Integrated Communications for 2013.
The mandate includes creative development and execution of the advertising campaign across multiple media platforms.
This year CCL will be telecast on the Star network. Eight channels of Star in eight languages will take this league to the audience. Starting 19 February, the league will air at 10 March.
According to the official communiqué, CCL is Rs 3 billion super league and the advertising spends will be in the region of Rs 100 million.
Push Integrated MD and CEO V.A. Shrikumar said, “CCL is the next generation entertainment. It will bring larger audiences to the field of entertainment and sports. We are charged and ready to package this product in a way that is going to set a new trend in the industry”.
CCL founder and managing director Vishnu Vardhan Induri said, “CCL is larger than life with its popularity challenging even the IPL. Push Integrated has brought alive the Blockbuster appeal of the competition. Their creative visualisation and ability to dovetail the communication idea into different media platforms is truly noteworthy”.
CCL is a 20-20 league cricket property involving stars from the feature film fraternity. It is a competitive league involving teams from Mumbai, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and West Bengal. Two new teams have been added from the Marathi and Bhojpuri regions.
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.
