MAM
Swati Bhattacharya to lead Dentsu Mama Lab
MUMBAI: Swati Bhattacharya, the former national creative director at JWT, who was associated with the company for 22 years, has joined Dentsu India as its principal partner – creative, to take the helm at its new project Mama Lab.
Started originally in Tokyo by Dentsu in 2013, and now to be introduced in India, the idea of Mama Lab is to create an ever-expanding picture of mothers in India, by tracing their personal histories across cities and villages and in-between places to answer a quintessential question on Indian mothers – Who is she? It will be an ongoing visual and oral biography of Indian mothers.
“Dentsu Mama Lab aims to be a thought leader on mothers, motherhood and mothering. Understanding the different facets of a mother is what will make brands connect meaningfully with them. I’m delighted to have Swati Bhattacharya lead this initiative in India. Her enormous experience of working on brands that have had deep meaningful connections with mothers will be the credible foundation of Dentsu Mama Lab. ‘Good Innovation’ is the essence of the Dentsu brand and Mama Lab is a vivid demonstration of it,” said Dentsu India executive chairman and APAC CEO Rohit Ohri.
In recent years, Swati Bhattacharya, a mother of two, was particularly responsible for building an enduring relationship with Horlicks (GSK India) and its several avatars, especially highlighting the sensitivities of the mother, wife and homemaker for the brand. Her experience in building such ‘mother’ and ‘women-oriented’ brands and taking up leadership positions in the corporate world makes her perfectly poised to head Mama Lab.
Excited to head the latest initiative at Dentsu India, Bhattacharya remarked, “Men have a habit of putting mothers on a pedestal, as if she is a person who needs to be worshipped more than be understood. There is a woman inside every mother, who is not all perfect, not all ‘Devi’, not all giving; and women know that but it’s time for marketers to know that too. It’s been years that I have spoken to only women as my consumers and tried to forge an intimacy that’s born out of truth. Mama Lab gives me an opportunity to speak to women in our own language, in our own way, we might not all be perfect but we are the best that we can be! I am so glad I won’t have to fake my interest in men anymore. I am looking forward to sell to women by pressing their security buttons and not their insecurity buttons”.
Much like motherhood that promises rich rewards through its firsthand trials, Mama Lab will evolve through experience and experimentation in both method and output.
“As with everything Indian, we know there is no such singular entity as The Indian Mother, and we wouldn’t want to embark on a quixotic adventure of that sort in the first place. What we will attempt to do is to create an ever-expanding picture of mothers in India, much like a perpetually-growing, always-complete-but-never-truly-complete jigsaw puzzle. As an outcome, our goal will be to gain insights into mothers and motherhood in India that will truly go beyond oft-repeated motherhood statements”, said Dentsu India executive vice-president and national planning director Narayan Devanathan, who will be closely working with Bhattacharya on Mama Lab.
Mama Lab will be positioned in the public domain as a platform for mothers and brands to engage with one another and benefit from.
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.
