MAM
Sudhanshu Vats to helm Asci in landmark 40th year
MUMBAI: Pidilite Industries managing director Sudhanshu Vats has been elected chairman of the Advertising Standards Council of India (Asci) at its 39th annual general meeting, taking charge as the country’s advertising regulator-by-consensus enters its fourth decade.
MullenLowe Global chief strategy officer S Subramanyeswar moves in as vice-chairman, while industry veteran Paritosh Joshi of Provocateur Advisory becomes honorary treasurer.
Founded in 1985 as a voluntary self-regulatory body, Asci is recognised by the Cable TV Act, Doordarshan, All India Radio and several key regulators. Its consumer complaints committee enjoys extraordinary acceptance for a voluntary code: in FY 2024-25, compliance hit 98 per cent for print advertising, 97 per cent for television and 81 per cent for digital. The supreme court has repeatedly cited Asci’s role in consumer protection.
Vats said the council’s job has “never been more important” as advertising mutates with technology and new formats. “Our responsibility is to ensure advertising is executed with integrity—centred on the product promise, respectful of the community and mindful of consumers,” he told members. “Self-regulation provides guidance to the industry and assurance to the public. The simple principle is to keep the consumer’s interest front and centre.”
Outgoing chairman Partha Sinha called his tenure “a comma in a sentence that keeps unfolding”. Over the past years, he said, Asci has “moved from being a watchdog to an enabler of responsible communication—partnering, not just policing,” and stepped “firmly into the digital arena, because responsibility cannot lag behind technology.”
To mark its fortieth year, the council unveiled an ambitious agenda:
* AdWise literacy drive – training more than a million schoolchildren to identify, question and evaluate advertising messages, reducing their vulnerability to misleading or harmful pitches.
* Gen-Alpha research – an ethnographic study of children born into the touchscreen age to craft a framework for responsible advertising to the next generation.
* New city offices – expansion of Asci’s physical footprint to Bengaluru and Delhi to deepen engagement across India.
* Legal knowledge hub – a comprehensive online resource on advertising codes and laws, developed with leading law firm Khaitan & Co.
* Podcast partnerships – a new series with The Logical Indian and Marketing Minds to spread awareness of responsible advertising.
* Visual commitment badge – a mark members can display in their communications and on websites to signal adherence to the Asci code.
Asci’s influence has widened well beyond complaint adjudication. The Asci Academy now drives education and thought leadership through masterclasses for marketers, faculty development programmes in media and advertising colleges, and a pre-production advisory service that helps advertisers check compliance before campaigns go live—avoiding costly post-release fixes.
In recent years the council has published widely cited white papers on dark patterns, artificial intelligence in advertising, the depiction of masculinity and the trust deficit around digital influencers. It has issued pioneering guidelines on influencer conduct, cryptocurrency, green claims and gender stereotyping, earning two global awards for leadership in self-regulation.
Looking ahead, Vats said Asci will “strengthen global partnerships and knowledge exchange with peer bodies worldwide, and invest in research, innovation and frameworks that respond to the realities of digital-first advertising.”
For a voluntary body that began as a modest industry code, the next chapter promises to be anything but quiet.
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.
