Ad Campaigns
Bassi, banter and a bronze: BBH India scores at Cannes Lions 2025
CANNES: BBH India has scrubbed up a shiny Bronze Lion at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2025, bagging the metal in the Social & Creator Lions – Use of Humour category for its cheeky campaign: Bassi vs Garnier Men Facewash.
Crafted for Garnier (L’Oréal India), the campaign took a tongue-in-cheek jab at scepticism itself—by turning comedian Anubhav Singh Bassi, once a mocker of facewash ads, into the star of one. The story escalated with over 100 Indian comedians rallying in support, including Harsh Gujral, before climaxing in a headline-stealing visual: John Abraham, Garnier’s brand ambassador, literally washing Bassi’s face on screen in a TVC.
Rooted in Bassi’s own stand-up routines about men’s skincare, the film played up “cooling, freshness and comic timing” in equal measure—making it both a cultural moment and a marketing masterstroke. Social chatter soon snowballed into broadcast-level attention.
“Bassi Vs Men’s Face Wash is an iconic campaign. One that started on social and ended up on broadcast,” BBH India chief creative officer Parikshit Bhattaccharya. “With all the attention the work has already garnered for the brand, a Cannes Lions metal is a great cherry on top. We couldn’t be happier for the teams at BBH and Garnier.”
Witty, well-timed, and wildly shareable—BBH India’s latest proves that when humour meets hustle, global glory follows.
You can watch the commercial by clicking here
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.
