MAM
This Diwali, Lay’s features quirky questions on its packets to engage with customers
NEW DELHI: Adding joy and cheer to the upcoming festive season, Lay’s, one of India’s leading potato chip brands, unveiled a fun and quirky #LaysKhol campaign. As part of this campaign, 18 special limited-edition Lay’s Kholo packs featuring an intriguing question on each pack with a quirky answer given inside the pack have been shared with celebrities, influencers, and friends of Lay’s.
The festive campaign comes at the back of recent PepsiCo India and Airtel announcement of the special initiative to offer up to 2GB of free data for the customers. The first phase of the #LaysKhol campaign featured popular cricketers including Virender Sehwag donning his special Baba Sehwag Avatar, Shikhar Dhawan, Yuzvendra Chahal, Brett Lee, Harbhajan Singh, and Rahul Tewatia. In the four-part video series, cricketers engaged in fun, quirky and laughter-inducing dialogues that not only engaged the cricket fans but also drove conversations in a clutter-breaking way.
PepsiCo India senior director and category head – foods Dilen Gandhi said, “During the festive season, consumers seek entertaining and light-hearted content. Building on this insight, our new campaign #LaysKhol features a unique brand association with popular cricketers, celebrities, and budding influencers, who are seen creating engaging and enjoyable content. Through the multi-channel campaign, our objective is to target brand fans, drive engagement, and deepen regional penetration. We’re confident that FAN’s of LAY’S will like the LAY’S Kholo pack memento crafted to add a little more fun and make their experience special.”
The activity has so far received an overwhelming response from the netizens and has garnered significant mileage for the brand with more than 1600 organic posts and stories leading to over 3.58 million engagement on social media.
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.
