Ad Campaigns
Pickled in action as Mumbai serves first smash of Picklebay India tour
MUMBAI: Rackets up, Mumbai, the pickleball party is about to begin. India’s first all-in-one pickleball platform, Picklebay, is stepping onto the court with the opening leg of its India Tour, scheduled from 31 May to 1 June, 2025. From amateurs to aces, teens to the 35 plus crowd, the event promises a rally of talent across singles, doubles, mixed, and age-group categories, making it one of the country’s most inclusive sporting formats.
This isn’t just a tournament, it’s a slice of sport, culture, and community, served with a digital edge and a side of pancakes.
“We’re excited to launch the tour in Mumbai, a city that perfectly captures the spirit of this new-age sport,” said Picklebay founder & CEO Siddhant Jatia. “This is more than a tournament. It’s a platform for community, culture, and the future of pickleball in India.”
The Mumbai leg is powered by a colourful squad of youth-first brands:
● Yaba (equipment partner)
● The Wellness Co (wellness partner)
● Plum Goodness (skincare partner)
● Total Sports and Fitness (retail partner)
● Franklin X-40 (official match ball sponsor)
● 99 Pancakes (dessert partner, for post-match sweet tooth)
But the real tech MVP is Picklebay’s digital backbone, which ensures real-time fixtures, scoring, and updates eliminating chaos and amplifying the competitive spirit. The seamless platform makes the sport more accessible and enjoyable, especially for India’s growing tribe of urban recreational athletes.
With the pickleball wave growing louder across India’s metros, this tour could be the ace that brings the game mainstream. And as Mumbai gets ready to smash, volley, and spin its way through the weekend, one thing’s clear Picklebay is here to play.
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.
