Ad Campaigns
MTV shows you it’s bigger than you think
MUMBAI: It isn’t India’s number one youth brand for nothing. One look at MTV’s latest trade campaign and you know why it leads the brat pack in both marketing and programming.
One message reads: “Cooking three billion Maggi packets and watching MTV takes the same time”. A video film goes on to explain how you can feed the whole of Pakistan plus Bangladesh by cooking for 1 billion minutes, but MTV is way bigger because it was consumed online for 6 billion minutes last year, which is also the time it takes to cook three billion packets of Maggi.
Another one states: “Fuel prices have grown but not as fast as MTV’s viewership”. Even here, MTV has trumped the ever-growing fuel prices by actually doubling its viewership over the past one year.
The third message goes: “The football World Cup was big – almost as big as the Roadies”. The film conveys how MTV Roadies was watched by 133 million Indians as compared to the 2018 Football World Cup which was viewed only by 111 million Indians.
A fourth one says: “MTV’s footprint is bigger than the population of the USA”. The video drives home the point that USA stands for everything big, including its population of 330 million, outdone only by MTV whose footprint is over 454 million.
All the messages have one goal – to make you believe that “It’s way bigger than you imagined.”
Having kicked-off on 12 November, the ad campaign, ran for three straight weeks across multiple trade agencies in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. It involved the use of high-impact inventory such as cafeteria facade, LED wall branding, LED screens, lift branding, DIGIPODS and tent cards on every desk.
Held at the Group M Cafeteria in Mumbai and Delhi on 29 November and 30 November respectively, the campaign saw engagement through games, using a life-size JENGA and JALEBI that lasted for about an hour and a half.
Not only media buying agencies across India but also work spaces of major spend brands such asBMW, Ford, GSK, Google and Pepsi got a taste of MTV’s bigness.
While rival channels in the youth genre have struggled to keep the youngsters hooked, this dynamic channel from the Viacom18 stable has found the secret sauce. The fact that season after season of its top shows like Roadies and Splitsvilla keep returning goes on to show the channel’s proved it knows how to take the pulse of the youth.
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.
