AD Agencies
Wondrlab will be an omnichannel strategist for clients: Saurabh Varma
NEW DELHI: When Leo Burnett opened the doors to his new-found agency in the middle of the Great Depression, he started a ritual of welcoming all visitors by giving them apples. At that time, many had prophesied that it won’t be long before Burnett ends up selling apples instead of giving them away. Cut to 85-years later, Leo Burnett is one of the largest agencies in the world, and its global offices still keep apple baskets on their reception desks – a sweet reminder of where it all started.
While this yarn has been told and retold several times, Saurabh Varma, an industry genius who spent several years working with Leo Burnett and eventually Publicis, derived inspiration from it. He also went one step further by launching his own venture, a platform-first agency – Wondrlab – amidst a global pandemic and impending economic slowdown.
In an exclusive conversation with Indiantelevision.com, Varma highlighted that though it is difficult to begin something in times like these, he wanted to challenge the things that he had earlier taken for granted.
Started in partnership with his long-term colleagues and friends Vandana Verma and Rakesh Hinduja, Wondrlab is Varma’s ambitious project aiming to help clients win in the new marketing landscape.
He explains, “Wondrlab is a model communications company that aims to provide disruptive services to its clients in experiential, content, and brand building strategies with a platform-first approach. We are planning to partner with platforms like Facebook, Google, YouTube, etc, to offer our clients solutions that suit their needs the best depending on which platform they are targeting. We are going to be the omnichannel strategists for them.”
Wondrlab will invest in creating martech platforms to provide tools to enable hitherto complex expensive bespoke executions at the push of a button. All of Wondrlab’s solutions are backed by data and automation that leads to efficiency, measurability and ROI through user-friendly platform interfaces, centralised marketing controls, personalised content and automated solutions at scale.
Varma shares that Wondrlab is seeking some strategic alliances and acquisitions to achieve this.
Apart from this, his short-term goals for Wondrlab are to invest in the right people and products, support the talent development of his teams, and create spectacular work for his clients.
“For me, the right talent pool is the one that is always ready to evolve and learn. Since we are doing something that is industry-first, we want people who are quick learners and are capable of collaborating with various platforms to support our platform-first strategy,” he highlights.
Currently, Wondrlab is a 70-people team with offices in Delhi and Mumbai, but Varma and team are on a hiring spree. For the mode of work, he is seeking to find a sense of balance between remote working and presence at the offices.
“The whole concept of the office is a paradox now and we are looking forward to striking the right balance between the options. We will obviously be partnering with various firms and people depending on a project-to-project basis,” he shares.
For the long term, his vision is to scale up each of the capabilities that Wondrlab promises and create a unique proposition of platform-first services, technologies, and strategies for the clients.
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.
