MAM
US creative marketing firms – Trailer Park, Creative Domain merge
MUMBAI: Two of the American entertainment industry’s creative marketing firms – Trailer Park and Creative Domain will merge.
The new entity will provide diverse entertainment marketing services in Hollywood. The new company, which will be known as Trailer Park, is backed by a financial commitment from Lake Capital, a private equity firm that invests in growing services companies.
The merger brings together Trailer Park, which is known for its theatrical trailers and teasers for major motion picture studios, including 20th Century Fox, Disney, DreamWorks, New Line Cinema, Paramount and Universal, and Creative Domain, which shares the same clientele but focusses on brand building campaigns in home entertainment products, such as DVDs and online games.
Trailer Park founder and CEO Tim Nett says, “We are creating the broadest platform of creative marketing services for the entertainment industry. Together, the capabilities of our two firms will allow us to deliver marketing services for our clients not only in theaters and on television, but also via new distribution platforms, including cell phones, PDAs and other wireless devices, and online.”
Trailer Park president Benedict Coulter says, “We have worked in conjunction with Creative Domain for many years and have admired each other’s work. Tim and I have always seen Creative Domain as one of the leading producers of brand-building campaigns for our mutual studio clients, particularly for home entertainment”.
Creative Domain co-founder Joel Johnston says, “With the window between theatrical and DVD release becoming narrower, coupled with the increasing importance of video and online games as entertainment franchises we believe that Creative Domain’s strength in home entertainment is a natural complement to Trailer Park’s established trailer business, allowing our combined companies to offer a strategic expertise to support all of the studios’ needs.”
Headquartered in Hollywood with 300 creative and marketing professionals, Trailer Park will now be able to offer services for all of the numerous forms of entertainment its studio clients produce delivered in formats that include wireless and mobile communications, such as podcasts and streaming video.
The company’s divisions include:
– Theatrical offers three main products, movie trailers, teasers, and television promotions for movies. Trailer Park Theatrical provides all of its services in-house, including writing, editing, graphics, website development, and music.
– Home Entertainment provides creative services for the DVD release campaigns of movies, including DVD menu navigation design, extras, and packaging, and video game advertising.
– TV offers creative services for network and cable television shows, made-for-TV movies, and new programme launches.
– Print creates movie, television program, and live entertainment marketing print materials, including ‘one sheets’ used in theaters, billboards, newspaper, and magazines.
– 1741 Films, Trailer Park’s commercial advertising production and motion graphics division, offers products in five areas: brand identity, entertainment advertising, live action, “main titles,” and television commercials.
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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.
