MAM
TAM India’s strategy research paper wins at WAM 2005 conference
MUMBAI: Tam India’s strategy research paper “Penta-gration,” which deals with a new technique to measure TV sponsorships, has won the best paper award at the WAM conference in Montreal.
Competing in the category of “Branded Entertainment & Sponsorships,” Tam beat presentations from Mindshare (Canada), OMD (USA), CTV (Canada), ABC Television (USA), iTVX (USA) and IAG (USA).
With this win, Tam also qualifies for the John & Mary Goodyear Award in ‘Global Research Excellence’ to be announced in December this year.
The paper, presented by Tam Media vice president Atul Phadnis, demonstrated a newly developed technique of evaluating sponsorships, product placements and branded entertainment on television by using five different researches.
WAM or Worldwide Audience Measurement conference is the largest broadcast research conference. Held jointly by ESOMAR (Netherlands) and the ARF (USA), it has more than 40 countries participating with delegate strength of 400-plus.
Tam this year had been invited to present three papers at WAM. The next one being presented by the TAM S-Group team of Amogh Dusad and Atul Phadnis is on 23 June and relates to evaluating new programme launches that use a multi-media blitz in their promotions.
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.
