Ad Campaigns
Cadbury Dairy Milk: How India came together to #CheerForAllSports
Mumbai: As the games season continues to engross the world, Cadbury Dairy Milk leveraged this opportunity to bring India together to step beyond the cricket fever and #CheerForAllSports. Launched recently to help athletes in underrepresented sports feel valued and acknowledged, the campaign sought to enable better connections between athletes and fans at the back of a tech-based solution. All one has to do is scan the QR code on the reimagined iconic Rs 100 Cadbury Dairy Milk released for the campaign, which will lead to a microsite with a calendar of all sporting events across Hockey, Boxing, Table Tennis, etc., currently running in India during the same period as the upcoming IPL season. To this end, the brand also installed specially made fan screens to create an electric atmosphere in the stadium for the athletes at the back of energized Indian fans cheering their sporting idols.
The campaign has witnessed an impassioned response from across the country with around 7 Lakh registrations on the brand microsite to watch and cheer on Indian athletes as they attain new heights across different tournaments on the World Stage. To date, people have cheered on Nishant Dev, Mohammed Hussamuddin, Sathiyan Gnanasekaran, Manika Batra, Deepak Punia and Nisha Dahiya as they competed in tournaments such as IBA Men’s World Boxing Championships 2023, World Table Tennis Star Contender 2023 and Senior Asian Wrestling Championship 2023 respectively, to bring sporting glory to India. Many of the competing athletes expressed their gratitude and happiness about seeing their fans supporting them on-screen that motivated them to compete even more fiercely.
With two more international competitions – the ITTF World Table Tennis Championships Finals 2023 and the FIH Pro League 2023 – on the roster this month, Cadbury Dairy Milk expects even more sign-ups from Indians looking to #CheerForAllSports, to witness their sporting heroes battle it out to bring the country recognition on an international arena.
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.
