Ad Campaigns
Harmanpreet Kaur joins Center Fruit’s “Mood Ting Tong” Gully cricket campaign
Mumbai: The cricket season in India is in full swing with the Indian Premier League 2023. While IPL has contributed to the nation’s passion for sport in the last decade, the real excitement has always been felt on playgrounds and in housing societies where gully cricket matches are played!
To capitalise on this euphoria and take the excitement quotient a notch above, Center fruit from the house of Perfetti Van Melle India has taken a step forward with its latest campaign ‘Mood Ting Tong League’. The brand has roped in ace cricketer and captain of the Indian Women’s cricket team – Harmanpreet Kaur and digital influencer RJ Sukriti as key protagonists who will be seen in a creative banter around gully cricket featuring Center fruit’s unique Tennis Ball shaped chewing gum.
The brand through this digital series aims to mirror India’s passion for sports, especially Women’s cricket through the idea of gully cricket, and bring alive the fervour. Harmanpreet Kaur, who recently captained Mumbai Indians to victory in the first Women’s Premier League is hence perfectly positioned to champion this idea.
Taking the insight from how a tennis ball has traditionally been used while playing gully cricket in India, the campaign will feature Center fruit Tennis ball-shaped gum – a first-of-its-kind chewing gum that comes in a tennis ball shape with pineapple-flavoured liquid filling.
Starring the multifaceted RJ Sukriti, the content series will see her as a colourful & relatable everyday character, bouncing her unique personality off to the serious Harmanpreet as they play gully cricket with the Tennis Ball-shaped chewing gum. The sequence progresses with both Sukriti & Harmanpreet stumping each other with their quirky comebacks and cricketing skills. Through this journey, Center fruit Tennis ball-shaped chewing gum is seen as a catalyst for ‘mood transformation’.
This digital-only series will be promoted on social media platforms like Instagram.
Perfetti Van Melle India marketing director Gunjan Khetan stressed the significance of women’s cricket and the brand’s proactive role in its promotion. He stated, “Cricket holds a special place in the heart of every Indian, and we believe it is crucial to also celebrate the immense talent and potential within women’s cricket. With the Mood Ting Tong League campaign, we are not only embracing India’s passion for cricket but also striving to shine a spotlight on women’s cricket. By featuring Harmanpreet, who embodies the dynamism of women’s cricket, we hope to inspire a new wave of enthusiasm among fans. Through our ting tong way, we aspire to create an inclusive and empowering cricketing experience that resonates with both existing fans and new audiences alike.”
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.
