Ad Campaigns
CaratLane unveils first salary campaign 2.0
Mumbai: CaratLane, India’s Omni-channel jewellery brand, has launched its latest campaign dedicated to celebrating everyone’s first salary. The campaign titled First Salary 2.0 has taken new shape and has been conceptualised and executed by BBH India. The brand is constantly looking at micro occasions that are very intimate in our lives and how jewellery can play an important role in making it more memorable. Receiving one’s first salary is a big milestone in anybody’s life, marking their foray into adulthood. Most people are looking to mark this moment with a special gift that would help express their gratitude to the ones who always put them first. The CaratLane and BBH teams drew from these thoughtful experiences to rebuild the ‘First Salary 2.0’ campaign.
With the relaunch of this campaign, CaratLane has also collaborated with 50+ creators across Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube to highlight what they did with their first salary, whether they took a vacation or they bought a piece of jewellery for their family. The campaign messaging reflects on how our mothers always put us first and now it’s our turn to return the love. CaratLane aims to tug at the heart strings and show consumers how a memorable occasion such as making a first salary purchase can also double up as a touching gesture towards your most special people.
Talking about the relaunch, CaratLane VP marketing Jennifer Pandy said, “As a brand, we are always looking at all the smaller yet significant moments in our lives where jewellery can help us express our emotions better. In a country like India, education and getting a job is paramount to establishing success early on in life. It has become all the more important to mark this occasion with something special and memorable. It is about the moment when the child feels ready to stand on their own feet and the roles start to reverse between them and their parents. It’s a rite of passage! A beautiful moment between a mother and her child which we have highlighted in the film is a homage to this very emotion.”
The campaign mainstay is a film that traces the story of a young girl who is excited to be receiving her first salary. Sharing the agency’s approach towards bringing the campaign to life, BBH India executive creative director Arvind Menon said, “Who is the greatest mentor giving some of the simplest work advice? Mom. Who is that late-night work buddy who always stays up with you? Mom, again. So, doesn’t your first salary moment belong to her as much as you? We weaved a story around this insight as Kittu, our charming protagonist, is struck by this realisation that prompts her to surprise her Ma with a beautiful first salary gift from CaratLane.”
This campaign is live on social media platforms of the brand and gifts are available on the website www.caratlane.com and in 230+ CaratLane stores across India.
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.
