MAM
Red Digital wins Collectabillia’s social media biz
MUMBAI: Digital agency Red Digital has bagged the social media mandate of online sports celebrity-commerce company Collectabillia.
Red Digital will maintain and manage the brand’s Facebook page and Twitter handle along with its YouTube channel and Pinterest account, to drive engagement and promote celebrity branded products amongst fans and enthusiasts encouraging them to collect and own sporting and movie memorabilia.
Red Digital’s focus is to elevate the reach of Collectabillia by implementing their core expertise in enhancing the engagement levels of their Facebook fan base and increasing twitter followers. Through YouTube and Pinterest, Red Digital plans to ensure high amount of visibility for the brand.
According to the agency, as Collectabillia’s digital partner, its priority is to build high engagement levels with fans and sports enthusiast alike. Red Digital will also educate the untapped market of the enthusiasts by presenting them with opportunities to collect and own personally autographed memorabilia.
Collectabillia aims to extend the global market of memorabilia to India, allowing the ownership of personalised merchandise. Extending similar themes across social networks, Red Digital will integrate an effective social media plan through various contests, trivia, campaigns and applications. Red Digital also plans to develop social e-commerce through Facebook buying, gifting and rating options.
Red Digital CEO Yashraj Vakil said, “Social Media has grown to be the epicenter of marketing and communication across all brands, especially e-commerce. Globally, brands have exploited the social media space successfully, to not only create fan base and reach, but also to fillip sales and create brand loyalists. Memorabilia and mementos is a premium and recognised industry in many developed countries and Indian companies need to take advantage of the ever-growing Indian population on Social Media platforms to explore, exploit and educate.”
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.
