MAM
Suku Murti joins DViO Digital’s advisory board
MUMBAI: DViO Digital, an integrated marketing company with a digital-first approach, announced today the appointment Suku Murti in its advisory board. Murti will play a key role by providing counsel on the growth and strategic decisions of the company especially in the sports, entertainment, and media industries.
An accomplished industry leader with more than three decades of national and regional business experience, Suku Murti has an established track record of leadership at large multi-national and domestic organisations including agencies, clients and media owners.
DViO Digital already has a cluster of entertainment accounts like Star, Universal Music, Gaana, Flipkart Video, Zee5 Global, MBC 4 (Leading TV network in Middle East) under its umbrella along with extensive experience in Sports Marketing and Suku Murti, who in his last role set up ESP Properties, the sports and entertainment arm of GroupM Media India, would bring in his expertise in the field to add value to DViO Digital.
Commenting on Suku Murti’s appointment, the company’s founder and CEO Sowmya Iyer said, “We are delighted to have Suku on board with us especially during a time where our company is significantly growing. We are at an inflection point where we constantly endeavour to reimagine and innovate our value proposition to our clients and I am confident that his extensive experience in media, entertainment and sports over the years would be instrumental in this journey as we grow in that sector.”
Commenting on his appointment, Murti said, “I have been observing and informally interacting with Sowmya and her talented pool of young digital professionals over the past two years. I was deeply impressed by the unbounded energy, the creative and tech capabilities, an efficient client service delivery mechanism with Pune as the hub and all this in a very short period which has helped them establish themselves as a formidable next generation marketing service provider.”
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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.
