MAM
Snapdeal appoints Govind Rajan as chief strategy officer
MUMBAI: Snapdeal has roped in Govind Rajan as its chief strategy officer, effective August 2015.
Prior to his appointment at Snapdeal, he most recently served as chief marketing officer (B2C) at Bharti Airtel, where he was responsible for revenue and market share growth, customer life cycle management, and building marketing capability across the organisation. Concurrently he also served as CEO – Airtel Money.
Before joining Airtel, Rajan was with Hindustan Unilever (HUL). He joined HUL as a management trainee in 1997 before serving in various marketing and leadership roles. In his 15 plus years at Unilever he worked across a diverse range of categories and also led sales teams in varied terrain and a wide variety of channels – from modern trade to rural.
While at HUL, he was the regional VP south Asia for skin cleansing and prior to that, VP for the skin care business. He also served as the customer marketing and sales operations head of HUL.
His portfolio included marquee brands such as Dove, Ponds, Fair & Lovely, Vaseline, Lakme, Pears, Lifebuoy and Lux. In these roles he was responsible for driving the P&L, Portfolio management across brands, building new categories such as body lotions, face-wash, and leading in market execution.
Rajan has masters in international business from Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT) and a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Madras.
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.
