MAM
Zee Cinema mulls 100% hike in ad rates
MUMBAI: Zee Cinema is getting aggressive. Having grown in viewership, the Hindi movie channel has decided to hike its ad rates by 100 per cent.
“We have made up our mind to activate a 100 per cent hike on our rates. We have already conveyed our plans to our clients and the planners,” Zee Cinema business head Bharat Ranga tells indiantelevision.com.
Behind this move is an expectation that the movie channel genre would further grow in viewership this year.
“While there was a 12 to 13 per cent increase in the audience share last year among all movie channels, the advertising revenue grew by only five to six per cent. The audience share is expected to grow by 25 to 30 per cent this year. Naturally, we sense a huge scope for growth on the ad revenue front,” says Ranga.
Advertisers aren’t fully convinced, though. Mediaedge: cia (Mumbai) GM Manas Misra feels that effecting such a huge hike would be a Herculean task for Zee Cinema because of the intense competition the genre is facing. “With the type of competition going on in the market place, this may not be an easy task for Zee Cinema. Obviously, it is leading in the genre. But at the same time, its competitors are also doing well,” he opines.
Ranga admits the task is to convince the advertisers. “They have a mindset issue. We have to convince the planners also. The whole process will take some time to complete,” he says.
Zee Cinema had brought a 30 per cent hike in its ad rates early this year. But the channel feels that it deserves a bigger increment. “That time, we didn’t increase the rates the way we should have. Zee Cinema, being the number one Hindi movie channel, deserves much more than what it is now getting. It is not an irrational price level we are looking at. I feel that a 100 per cent hike is justifiable,” says Ranga.
According to Ranga, Zee Cinema has been the number two revenue earner for Zee Network last fiscal, behind the flagship channel Zee TV. “Last fiscal, our ad revenues went up by 45 per cent while viewership recorded a 15 per cent increase,” he claims.
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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.
