Digital
Kantar Creative Effectiveness Awards: HUL dominates the digital category
Mumbai: Marketing data and analytics company, Kantar unveiled on Thursday the ads that were most effective and creative in 2021 across India. The firm tested more than 13,000 creatives for clients around the world throughout 2021. 10 percent (1300+) of those creatives were tested in India alone.The India report shortlisted over 350 ads, tested across categories, markets, target groups and media channels.
Some of the findings from Kantar’s Strategic Sparks for effective and creative digital advertising are:
- Customized and integrated content yields significantly higher ROI: Carrying forward creative stories and elements from other media amplifies the impact of digital assets.
- Shoot for instant meaning: Given the attention poor consumers and short window available, it pays to ensure that the consumers are not called to do any additional work for decoding what they are supposed to think and feel about the brand
- Ride the moment: Embrace the topical issues and trends, to engage and be relevant
- Strike an emotive chord: Well told stories open up consumers for longer format videos
- Hook them early: Promise of a fulfilling story arc, emotive journey and humour help in ensuring that consumers stay invested beyond 6 seconds.
Commenting on this year’s winners, Kantar Insights Division managing director & chief client officer Soumya Mohanty said, “The spread of ads that consumers have perceived to be both creative and effective is an affirmation of the fact that the space for creativity even in context of marketing ROI is infinite. While there is no magic formula for creating such ads, we can start with the right ingredients and refine them by testing them out with consumers. Kantar is pleased to share the learnings that we have had in the area while working with the leading marketeers in India.”
Key highlights from this year’s report identified for effective and creative TV advertising:
- Indians love to ride fulfilling story arcs: Stories create room for empathy, engagement, and vivid memories through which one could influence the way in which consumers think & feel about the brands.
- Touch of drama helps: Just the right kind and quantity of spice delivered through creative storytelling and filmmaking, elevates even the repetitive themes, to make them more personal, relevant and aspirational.
- License to be extravagant in visualization: Indians are open to suspending their disbelief for the well visualised film.
- Layer in emotional meaningfulness: Emotive contexts have the potential to make the consumers warm up to even the dry functional categories.
- Show, not tell: Integrating brand payoffs as an organic plot event in the script is a timeless approach toward creating vivid and persuasive memories.
Kantar’s collaboration with the Unstereotype Alliance has led to the development of the Unstereotype metric (UM) which Kantar now includes as a measure of gender portrayal in advertising as an integral part of its Link™ communication pretesting solution. Thus, setting a foundation for marketers to review the potential of their creative executions on this dimension to monitor progress over time.
Unstereotype metric* (UM) in the long term provides learning and context for gender progressive advertisements. UM is now measured for 14,000+ ads across 70 countries, 3,300+ brands and 251 categories.
⎯ Unstereotyping in advertisements is predicted to unlock higher marketing ROI. It signifies strong brand equity and is likely to impact short term sales as well. This impact is not only true for women, but progressive male role models also impact business outcomes across categories.
⎯ Progressive ads are more effective and trigger positive engagement. They are in general seen to be more enjoyable, relevant, different and even pleasantly surprising.
⎯ Unstereotyping affects various aspects of the brand- power, meaningfulness, difference and saliency especially seen in food & beverage, household and personal care categories.
⎯ There are clear and present rewards for brands that seek to be at the forefront of embedding progressive gender roles
Digital
Galleri5 launches India’s first AI cinema OS at India AI Summit
Collective Artists Network unveils end-to-end production platform powering Mahabharat series and Hanuman teaser.
MUMBAI: India’s cinema just got an AI operating system upgrade because why settle for tools when you can have a full production command centre? Collective Artists Network and Galleri5 today unveiled Galleri5 AI Studio at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, billing it as the country’s first cinema-native production technology platform. Launched on 20 February 2026, the system acts as an end-to-end orchestration layer for film and television, integrating generative AI, LoRA-driven character architecture, controlled shot pipelines, 3D/VFX tools, lip-sync, upscaling, quality control, and delivery, all tuned for theatrical and broadcast standards.
Unlike piecemeal AI tools, Galleri5 controls the entire stack from script and world-building to final master output. Filmmakers retain creative authorship, continuity, and IP security while slashing timelines from years to months.
The platform is already in live use at scale. Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh, an AI-powered series produced under Collective’s Historyverse banner, is airing on Star Plus and streaming on JioHotstar, ranking among the top-watched shows in its slot. Meanwhile, Chiranjeevi Hanuman – The Eternal (produced by Star Studios 18) dropped its teaser on IMAX screens, leveraging Galleri5’s infrastructure for the visuals.
Collective Artists Network founder and group CEO Vijay Subramaniam said, “For India to lead in the next era of storytelling, we have to think beyond tools and start building systems. This is about putting durable production infrastructure in place so creators can dream bigger, producers can execute faster, and our stories can travel further.”
Galleri5 partner at Collective and CEO Rahul Regulapati added, “Cinema requires precision, repeatability, and control. Off-the-shelf AI doesn’t solve that. Orchestration does. We built an operating system where technology bends to filmmaking, not the other way around.”
Under Historyverse, Collective Studios is developing a slate including Hanuman, Krishna, Shiva, and Shivaji blending advanced AI systems with traditional craft. The summit session featured directors from Hanuman, Krishna, and Shiva alongside Collective leaders, diving into real-world case studies: what delivers on screen, what glitches, and how production economics are shifting.
At a summit packed with global tech brass and policymakers, Galleri5 stakes a bold claim, cinema’s future belongs to integrated systems, not isolated gadgets and India is building one right now. Whether you’re a filmmaker eyeing faster workflows or just curious about AI remaking epics, this OS could be the script-flip the industry didn’t see coming.
