Ad Campaigns
Wild Stone ad shows men’s desire for precious stones
MUMBAI: McNROE, owner of brands Wild Stone and Secret Temptation has launched its latest television commercial for Wild Stone Code.
Code is a sub-brand with six variants inspired by precious metals (platinum, titanium, gold, copper, bronze and steel), which is reflective of the quality of fragrances on offer and operates in the premium segment of perfumed body spray category.
The commercial is a tongue-in-cheek story that showcases the eternal fight men have had in the quest for precious metals.
Conceptualised by Soho Square, the TVC is staged in a sub-terrestrial cavern with a group of young miners in the hunt for something precious. The story is about the essence of a man’s devious want to own fragrances as exquisite as precious metals, and he is ready to fight his fellow men for it.
“Men have always fought over precious metals. The collection from is yet another great reason for them to start a new fight,” avers Ogilvy & Mather chief creative officer Sukesh Nayak.
McNROE consumer products chief business officer Sanjay Srivastava says, “Code has always had a strong consumer preference for its fragrances. This is an attempt to strengthen and leverage the consumer acceptance to build a larger franchise.”
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.
