MAM
Rebel Foods awards Sweet Truth TV campaign to DCMN
NEW DELHI: DCMN India has won the mandate for Rebel Foods’ premium Western dessert brand Sweet Truth. The marketing campaign consists of a brandformance TV flight for the Indian market, which was launched on 15 October 2020.
Aside from media planning and booking, DCMN will track and optimize the campaign’s performance using their proprietary TV attribution tool DC Analytics. The ads are being rolled out nationwide, including in the 35 cities where Sweet Truth is available. The campaign is targeting young men and women who are quality-conscious western dessert lovers. And the cherry on top: Users can give a dessert to a beloved fellow sweet tooth with a personalised video.
“We are excited about being able to support Sweet Truth’s growth with a very targeted campaign and all analytics as well as media expertise available to us. Given the fast development of this industry, especially in the context of the ongoing pandemic, brandformance TV is the perfect approach to grow the Sweet Truth brand among its target groups,” said Bindu Balakrishnan, country head of DCMN India.
Sweet Truth is the fourth brand from the Rebel Foods ecosystem that DCMN is onboarding. The two companies are already working together to grow the Behrouz Biryani, OvenStory and Faasos brands. The Sweet Truth account will also be serviced from DCMN’s Gurgaon office and will be led by Balakrishnan.
On the launch of the campaign, Rebel Foods VP-brands Nishant Kedia said it will speak to their target audience of urban dessert lovers with a refined palate in a meaningful way.
Sweet Truth is India's online delivery service for premium Western desserts – for all occasions. Its parent company is Rebel Foods (formerly Faasos), which runs 350+ cloud kitchens delivering across India, South East Asia, UK and UAE.
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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.
