Hungama eyes ad sales business, appoints Kunal Arora ad sales head

Virtual Marketing India Pvt. Ltd, which owns Hungama.com, is eyeing the ad inventory sales business in the entertainment portals category. It is setting up a media services team which will represent various entertainment portals and reach out to advertisers to generate ad inventory.

Hungama is expected to tie up with some entertainment portals in order to sell their ad inventory. Siddhartha Roy, chief operating officer, consumer business, Hungama.com, reveals, “We are setting up our media services team using which we will sell ad inventory for entertainment based portals. We will not sell inventory for just two portals, but for a group of portals. We will approach advertisers and offer them a comprehensive package of entertainment portals and allow them to choose any portal they want to advertise on.” Roy declined to name the portals for which Hungama will be selling ad inventory.

Commenting on his role, Arora says, “Earlier, Hungama was focused more on business deals, but now onwards, we will be focusing on consumers directly. My responsibility will be to generate ad inventory for portals – Bollywoodhungama.com, an entertainment portal, and Nautanki.tv, an online video media network. Earlier, we didn’t have an ad sales team for our consumer business, but we are setting it up now.”

Arora has more than seven years of experience in the digital ad sales business. He started his career with Hungama in 2000 as assistant manager, digital ad sales. In 2002, he moved to LG as head of its digital business. He set up LGezbuy.com, LG’s online shopping portal, and managed the company’s online shopping deals with Indiatimes.com and Rediff.com. Arora has also spent three years in ad sales at Yahoo! India.

Hungama is reported to have acquired a controlling stake in Nautanki.tv. However, Sunil Nair, chief executive officer, Nautanki.tv, refused to comment on this. He says, “I am not going to confirm or deny that Hungama has invested in Nautanki. But we have an advertising sales deal with Hungama under which Hungama will generate ad inventory in the form of pre-roll and post-roll video ads for 10-30 seconds for Nautanki.tv.”

Nair adds, “We will be launching four branded entertainment based social networking portals in the coming days, which will be powered by the Spaces platform of Youtopia.in. Each portal will have its own URL. Hungama will look after the advertising sales for these social networks as well.”