MAM
Wavemaker India wins media duties for Acko General Insurance
MUMBAI: Wavemaker India has won the duties to manage both online and offline media for Acko General Insurance – touted as one of the most promising fin-tech start-ups in the country.
Wavemaker vice president Kishan Kumar MS said, “Brands like Acko are disrupting categories in which they operate in. In a fast-growing insurance category, they’re the first online-only general insurer in the country. At Wavemaker, we strongly believe that by helping such disruptor brands win, we get better at what we do. I am looking forward to applying our media, content and technology expertise on Acko and more importantly keen to create some new codes of brand building in the process.”
Acko CEO Varun Dua commented, “We are excited to partner with Wavemaker. They bring in years of experience and expertise in building brands. Team Wavemaker impressed us with their approach and on the ground diverse team support. Our focus will be to learn from best practices while driving innovation through multiple experiments across different media avenues and formats of communications.”
Acko head of business Jagjeet Harode said, “We are delighted to partner with Wavemaker in the journey to create brand Acko. They bring in the required balance of buying expertise and adaptability to support us. Looking forward to some industry-first innovations to reach consumers in a more personalised manner.”
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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.
