Ad Campaigns
Spotify India’s #PlayThis campaign by 22feet Tribal Worldwide trends on Twitter
NEW DELHI: On World Music Day, Spotify India launched an innovative Twitter campaign #PlayThis. The idea centers around the twitterverse discovering playlists by using any emoji of their choice. Conceptualised by 22feet Tribal Worldwide, part of the DDB Mudra group, the activation gained traction in the very first hour, with people trying out different combinations of emojis to find a playlist. Through the day the engagement grew exponentially, where at one point the #Playthis trended at #5 worldwide. It featured in the top 10 topics in over 17 countries including India, USA, Australia and Canada. It also ranked No.14 as the "Longest Trending Hashtag Worldwide" on Twitter worldwide.
The campaign speaks to today's generation who prefer to express their feelings through emojis. Music is all about emotions and Spotify offers a playlist for every single one of them. Building on this insight, Spotify India and 22feet Tribal Worldwide let the world discover music in a language they were most comfortable with.
The idea was brought to life with a first-of-its-kind Twitter partnership in India, where an engine was created to map all the emojis available on both Android and iOS platforms. These 3304 emojis were then systematically mapped to specifically curated Spotify playlists. All one had to do was tweet an emoji of their choice, and in a matter of seconds, they received a playlist representing that emotion.
The campaign performed exceedingly well even with users actively tweeting about World Yoga Day, Father’s Day and Donald Trump’s Oklahoma rally among others, which all occurred on the same day. Reaching over 243k conversations globally, Spotify India generated 39k engagements on Twitter within 24 hours.
22feet Tribal WW, national creative director Debashish Ghosh said, “Music and emojis have quite a few things in common – both are universal languages that transcend boundaries and allow emotions to be expressed and shared. We decided to intersect these two and explore the ideas that emerged once we added Spotify’s key differentiator – their curated playlists, as the third element into the mix. That’s how #PlayThis on World Music Day came about. It was designed to connect in the moment with music fans and elevate their experience by making it participatory and personalised on the back of an automated engine. The response has been phenomenal and humbling to say the least. It reaffirms the belief that simple ideas still fly high.”
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.
