AD Agencies
Samir Shanbhag steps up as executive director at Saatchi & Saatchi India
MUMBAI: Saatchi & Saatchi India has strengthened its senior leadership bench with the elevation of Samir Shanbhag as executive director, effective January 2026. The move caps a steady rise at the agency, where Shanbhag has spent the last two-and-a-half years shaping business, clients and culture.
Shanbhag was most recently executive vice-president at Saatchi & Saatchi India, a role he held from August 2023 to December 2025. In his new position, he will play a wider leadership role across client partnerships, strategic direction and agency operations from Mumbai.
With a career spanning close to three decades, Shanbhag brings deep experience across markets and categories. Before joining Saatchi & Saatchi India, he was a founding leader at Rain Creative in Dubai, where he helped build the agency into a respected independent creative outfit. He spent nearly a decade there as director, overseeing operations, business development, profitability and strategic output, while also championing planning and integrated thinking in a young agency set-up.
Earlier, Shanbhag was business director at DDB Dubai, where he led the agency’s largest and most profitable business group. His portfolio included marquee brands such as PepsiCo, Emirates, Henkel and Abu Dhabi Media. In his final full year at DDB Dubai, the unit delivered annual revenues of $4 million, including 35 per cent year-on-year growth driven largely by organic expansion.
His career began in Mumbai in the mid-1990s, with stints at Ogilvy and Contract Advertising. At Contract, he was part of the founding team that built iContract Mumbai into one of India’s leading direct and digital marketing agencies within four years. Notably, he was also part of the team that won India’s first Gold Lion for Direct Marketing at Cannes in 2002 for the ICICI Children’s Growth Bond campaign.
A post-graduate in banking and finance from the University of Mumbai, Shanbhag entered advertising in 1995 and never looked back. Over the years, he has worked across categories ranging from snacks, beverages and dairy to banking, insurance, travel and logistics, combining strategic rigour with creative ambition.
Outside work, he is an avid reader, traveller, food explorer and cricket watcher, interests that mirror the curiosity and range he brings to his professional life.
With Shanbhag’s elevation, Saatchi & Saatchi India signals its intent to double down on seasoned leadership at a time when clients are demanding sharper thinking, deeper partnerships and business-led creativity. For Shanbhag, it is a homecoming of sorts, and for the agency, a clear bet on experience that knows how to turn ideas into impact, fast.
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.
