AD Agencies
White Rivers Media retains grooming brand Gatsby’s digital account
MUMBAI: Mandom Group’s grooming brand in Asia – Gatsby has associated with White Rivers Media for the third time in row.
As part of the mandate, White Rivers Media, the digital agency, will continue to manage their digital and social media presence across India.
Gatsby India’s branding ideas have successfully managed to resonate with their target audience. Since the first year of the brand’s association with White Rivers Media, this digital agency has studied their target audience well and accommodated these insights into content. Engaging content on the page is exclusively targeted towards young urban men, which has resulted in an impressive engagement rate.
To put their best foot forward in the future, this collaboration aspires to explore different permutation and combinations of engaging content, media spends, ad models to optimise their reach. The agency also plans to strike conversations in the community and sense the sentiment for various messages. These insights will help them to enhance brand management, evolve in their own space and stay ahead of their competition.
White Rivers Digital Media chief executive officer and founder Shrenik Gandhi says, “We have been working closely with team Gatsby since past 2 years and I am looking forward to a great next year with the brand. While a good portion of our time this year shall be invested in building the brand in the ‘traditional digital’ manner, special efforts are being taken to capture the new age digital audience via innovative and category first digital activations. I take this opportunity to thank team Gatsby India on the continued trust they have on us.”
Gardenia Cosmocare (exclusive agent for Gatsby n India) director Puneet Motiani adds, “A good sense of product market as well as a keen ear to the ground greatly assists in selecting the right target audience and engaging them in a fun and constructive manner allowing for meaningful brand interactions which in turn results in positive and improved consumer experiences.”
For the past ten years, male grooming products have cut out a strong niche for themselves in the global market. In addition to the initial connection of beard to masculinity, being well-groomed is now an essential part of a young man’s routine. To buy these grooming products or gain more information about them, they turn to the web world. Hence, accurate branding of these grooming products in the digital space is extremely important.
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.
