Ad Campaigns
Simplilearn launches maiden TVC campaign with Irrfan Khan
NEW DELHI: Certification training company Simplilearn has launched its first television campaign titled ‘Get Certified, Get Ahead’ featuring actor Irrfan Khan.
The campaign aims to encourage working professionals to break their inertia and pro-actively shape their careers by acquiring new technology skills and certifications.
The campaign is on air from today (10 February) and will be live across digital and channels.
Conceptualised by Bangalore-based agency Propaganda, the TVC urges every working professional to take charge of his or her career in order to get ahead and not depend on luck. With Khan’s message, the TVC compares the workplace to a game of chess where every professional’s goal is to make it to the next level. And how, the protagonist took matters of his career, like certification training from Simplilearn, and zoomed ahead of others to become the boss and occupy the cabin, which symbolises success in corporate world.
Simplilearn’s ‘Get Certified, Get Ahead’ campaign marks how ‘edu-tech’ has come of age in India, and is becoming mainstream. The national campaign highlights Simplilearn’s plans to increase the visibility of its online certification courses in trending categories such as Big Data & Analytics, Digital Marketing, Cloud Computing, Project Management, and IT Security to white-collared professionals spread across Tier-I and Tier-II cities.
Simplilearn chief product and marketing officer Kashyap Dalal said, “Acquiring new in-demand skills through industry acclaimed certifications is a guaranteed way for professionals to get ahead in their careers. This is also one of the biggest requirements for industry to grow, as talent availability is regularly sighted as one of the biggest challenges by Fortune 500 CEOs. Through this national campaign on television and digital channels, I see Simplilearn playing a much more active role in the skill building needs of working professionals as well as enterprises in India.”
Propaganda co-founder & business director Priya Jayaraman added, “The Simplilearn campaign touches upon real corporate aspirations and a way to achieve them. Each of us dream of getting ahead in our corporate life, and do not know how to go about it. The reason to rope in Irrfan Khan was that the story needed to shake every working professional out of an inertia of not having done much about planning their career. People associate with Irrfan for his unassuming take on life, being the voice of reason and optimism. We intentionally kept it a simple narrative to let the power of the message echo with a working professional’s sentiments.”
NATIONAL: Amazon Ads has laid out a sharply tech-led vision for the advertising industry in 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence, streaming TV and creator partnerships will combine to turn brand building into a more precise, performance-driven business.
At the heart of the shift, the company says, is the fusion of AI with Amazon’s vast trove of shopping, browsing and streaming signals, allowing advertisers to move beyond blunt reach metrics to campaigns designed around real customer behaviour.
“The future of advertising is not about reaching more people, but the right people with messages that resonate,” said Amazon Ads India head and vice president Girish Prabhu. “By combining AI with deep customer insights, we help brands move from broadcasting campaigns to having meaningful conversations wherever audiences spend their time.”
One of the biggest changes, according to Amazon Ads, will be the collapse of the wall between media planning and creative development. Retail media, powered by first-party data, is increasingly shaping everything from brand discovery to final purchase, pushing marketers to design campaigns around audience insight rather than internal instinct.
AI is also moving from a support tool to a creative engine. Agentic AI, which automates and accelerates production, is expected to make high-quality creative accessible even to small businesses, compressing weeks of work into hours and giving challengers the ability to compete with larger brands on speed and scale.
Behind the scenes, AI-driven analytics will take on a bigger role in campaign optimisation, identifying patterns, spotting opportunities and recommending actions that would previously have required teams of analysts.
Streaming TV is another big battleground. With India’s video streaming audience now above 600 million and connected TV users at 129.2 million in 2025, advertisers are set to treat streaming not just as a branding channel but as a performance engine, measured increasingly by sales, sign-ups and bookings rather than just reach.
Finally, Amazon Ads sees creators and contextual advertising reshaping how brands tell stories. Creators will act less like influencers and more like long-term partners, while scene-aware ads on streaming platforms will allow brands to insert hyper-relevant offers into the flow of what viewers are watching.
Taken together, Amazon Ads argues, these shifts mark a move towards advertising that is both more human and more measurable, where AI handles the complexity, and creativity does the persuading.
