Ad Campaigns
Surf Excel’s latest TVC is all about keeping your inner child alive
Mumbai: Growing older comes with pre-conceived notions of ‘acting your age’ that one has been societally conditioned towards. But it is indeed the moments of letting the inner child out in spontaneous abandon that make our lives fuller. Surf Excel uses this thought in its latest Holi campaign to bolster its ‘Daag Achhe Hain’ brand proposition. The new TVC seeks to inspire us to keep our inner child alive and give into these playful impulses.
The 360 degree campaign film crafted by Carlos Creatives showcases a heart-warming bond between a little girl and aunt, with the former wanting to include her aunt in the animated festive celebration amongst children. When the little girl insists that her aunt join them, the aunt moves away, saying it’s not her age to play like them. How the child convinces the lady to drop her inhibitions and join in the fun and experience pure child-like glee forms the essence of the ad film. The film accompanied with the message ‘Jo Rang Bachpan Lautaye, Woh Rang Achhe Hain’ makes us examine the boundaries that keep us away from finding the joy of reliving our childhood.
“This year we wanted to steer our ‘Daag Achhe Hain’ towards bringing the inner child within each of us to life, and experiencing the joy of child-like abandon,” said Hindustan Unilever home care executive director Prabha Narasimhan, commenting on the launch of the campaign. “With our latest TVC campaign we aim to strike an emotional chord in a slice-of-life context that appeals to every adult. While the context in the film is that of Holi, the message is an all-pervasive one. We hope our consumers connect with it as much as we did while conceptualising it.”
The campaign goes live across TV and outdoor media from 1 March.
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.
