MAM
The 120 Media Collective overhauls senior management team
MUMBAI: The 120 Media Collective, a digitally-inclined company that creates and distributes content for audiences and brands across multiple platforms, has made two senior appointments.
While Shilpa Ambre has joined as chief financial officer for The 120 Media Collective, Vishal Nongbet has been roped in as Sooperfly senior vice president and business head.
Both Ambre and Nongbet will be based in Mumbai and will report to The 120 Media Collective founder and CEO Roopak Saluja.
Ambre will be responsible for all finance, legal affairs and investor relations of The 120 Media Collective and its sub brands – Jack in the Box Worldwide, Sniper, Bang Bang Films and Sooperfly.
Nongbet, on the other hand, has been entrusted with building the Sooperfly team and business and running day-to-day operations including content, distribution and monetization across APAC.
Additionally, Bang Bang Films senior producer Chahna Rupani has been promoted to Sniper executive producer and will primarily be responsible for driving revenues and growth, while ensuring excellence and efficiencies for both commercials and content production.
“The company has undergone a metamorphosis of sorts over the past three years, from being a combined entity of a production company and a social media agency to one that is pushing the boundaries and blurring the lines between communications, entertainment and technology. As we embark on an ambitious growth plan over the next 36 months, bolstering our leadership team with top talent is essential. Keeping the company adequately funded and observing the highest standards of compliance and governance will be key and having someone of Shilpa’s experience and capability overseeing things is of paramount importance,” said Saluja.
Commenting on Nongbet’s appointment, Saluja said, “Our goal with Sooperfly is clearly to capitalize on all that we’ve built up over the past eight plus years- chief among which are our ability to create compelling content and our credibility with brands- to give ourselves a competitive advantage in the digital video space. Only someone of Vishal’s breadth and depth of media experience, which arms him with a profound understanding of mobile and content monetization, can make a success of this.”
Ambre opined, “I am very excited to join the strong and accomplished team at The 120 Media Collective and I’m looking forward to leveraging my experience to support the rapidly growing business operations of the Company and its stakeholders.”
“While the last two decades have been all about the democratisation of content, there has never been a better time than now for advertisers to engage their audiences via owned rather than paid or earned media. Sooperfly will be looking at harnessing the immense talent in the space, building content brands direct to audiences, and finding that sweet spot between content creators and advertisers,” added Nongbet.
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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.
