MAM
Chupps Footwear unveils comfort-led campaign with ‘sleeping feet’
30-second film uses visual metaphor to showcase comfort across digital platforms.
MUMBAI: When comfort kicks in, it seems even your feet clock out. Chupps Footwear has rolled out a new campaign that takes a sharply minimalist route to communicate a familiar promise comfort. Instead of leaning on cushioning claims or tech jargon, the brand flips the script, showing what comfort looks like when it quietly does its job. Conceptualised by INTO Creative, the campaign centres on a 30-second hero film supported by static creatives across YouTube, Meta and OTT platforms. It marks a shift from feature-led messaging to a more evocative, almost hypnotic storytelling approach.
The film itself is stripped to its essentials. A series of feet wearing Chupps gradually tilt and collapse sideways, mimicking the act of falling asleep. There is no voiceover, no dramatic setting just repetition, rhythm and a single-minded visual idea. The payoff is equally understated: the brand logo and the line, “Comfortable Footwear.”
What adds texture is the soundtrack. Built around the recurring line “So gaya re…”, the music introduces a playful contrast to the stillness on screen. Each ‘sleeping’ foot lands on beat, creating a pattern that is oddly satisfying and difficult to ignore.
The creative insight is simple but effective. If real comfort makes the body relax, why not show feet doing exactly that? It is a metaphor that sidesteps category clichés while staying rooted in a universally understood feeling.
For Chupps, the campaign also signals a broader repositioning. Having earlier experimented with sustainability-led messaging through its 2025 biodegradable hoarding activation, the brand is now exploring storytelling that leans more on sensory recall than specification.
The challenge, as with most footwear brands, is differentiation in a crowded market where “comfort” is table stakes. By choosing to demonstrate the outcome rather than explain the input, Chupps attempts to carve out a more distinctive voice, one that relies less on features and more on feeling.
Because sometimes, the strongest proof of comfort is not what you say, it is what your feet do when no one’s watching.
Digital
Google partners with Adani and Airtel to build India’s largest AI data centre
The three-campus complex, built with Adani and Airtel, is India’s largest-ever technology infrastructure investment
Visakhapatnam: Google has broken ground on what it is billing as India’s largest-ever technology infrastructure project: a gigawatt-scale artificial intelligence hub in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, built in partnership with AdaniConneX and Nxtra by Airtel. The ceremony at Tarluvada on 28th April marked the start of construction on a three-campus data centre complex that sits at the heart of a $15 billion investment Google has committed to deploying across India between 2026 and 2030.
The numbers are staggering by any measure. Nearly 1 gigawatt of compute capacity at a single location, three data centre campuses, a fibre-optic expansion under the America-India Connect initiative, and a long-term clean energy strategy designed to feed new renewable supply into the national grid. Google says the project will help India hit its target of 500 gigawatts of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030 while delivering the high-performance, low-latency infrastructure that businesses need to build and scale AI-powered services.
The groundbreaking drew a formidable gathering of political and corporate India. Union minister for information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw, Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu and state IT minister Nara Lokesh attended alongside Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian, Adani Group directors Karan Adani and Jeet Adani, and Bharti Enterprises vice chairman Rakesh Mittal.
Vaishnaw framed the project in terms of national ambition. “The India AI hub and three subsea cables landing in Visakhapatnam will become very important infrastructure for the country’s journey forward,” he said, adding his thanks to Google for its “continued trust in India.” Naidu was equally bullish, describing Andhra Pradesh as “India’s premier investment destination” and the Vizag hub as a cornerstone of the state’s technology corridor. “Our vision goes beyond attracting investment,” he said. “We want local talent, startups, and enterprises to become active partners in this technology-driven growth story.”
Kurian called the groundbreaking “a powerful realization of our shared vision with the Indian government, and an inflection point for the country’s AI-native future.” Jeet Adani was characteristically direct: “When energy becomes more affordable and increasingly powered by clean sources, intelligence becomes more accessible, and that is how India will lead the next phase of digital growth.” Gopal Vittal, executive vice chairman of Bharti Airtel, said the full stack of data centres, green power, pan-India fibre and a next-generation cable landing station would enable “large-scale, world-class AI infrastructure in Vizag.”
The project was first announced in October 2025. AdaniConneX and Nxtra by Airtel will lead construction of the data centre buildings and connecting infrastructure, with Google deploying its AI capabilities on top.
Beyond the hardware, Google has announced a substantial package of community programmes. On water, it is partnering with Sponge Collaborative on a watershed management plan linking coastal ecosystem restoration with clean drinking water systems, including reverse osmosis plants and Water ATMs, for local residents. On livelihoods, a tie-up with the Sambhav Foundation will equip more than 1,000 fisherfolk with GPS navigation, weather-forecasting tools, cold-chain management training and UPI-based financial literacy. The Google Udaan India Fund, run through ChangeX, will provide direct grants to local schools and social enterprises for AI skilling labs and digital literacy programmes. The NARI Shakti programme, developed with the Learning Links Foundation, will support more than 10,000 women entrepreneurs from low-income backgrounds in building micro-enterprises. The Skills Trade and Readiness programme will prepare more than 1,000 local workers for construction, welding and facility operations roles, while a parallel tie-up with ICT Academy will train more than 1,200 students and educators in cloud computing and generative AI.
The groundbreaking was accompanied by the Bharat AI Shakti Conclave, a conference organised with the Andhra Pradesh government and Nara Lokesh, bringing together suppliers, industry partners and infrastructure firms to map how Google’s anchor investment can be turned into a broader economic value chain for the region. The conclave’s central theme was building an AI industrial corridor, with a local-first procurement approach and the integration of regional small and medium enterprises into Google’s global operational frameworks.
Every major technology company in the world has been courting India. What sets Vizag apart is the sheer scale of the commitment and the deliberate effort to build an industrial ecosystem around it rather than simply plant servers in a field. Google is not just betting on India’s digital future; it is trying to build the factory floor on which that future gets made. Whether the $15 billion translates into genuine local opportunity, or merely into an impressive data centre humming quietly on the Andhra Pradesh coast, will depend on whether those community programmes prove as durable as the hardware. The groundbreaking, as ever, is the easy part.
