Ad Campaigns
WATConsult & Project Nanhi Kali show a powerless queen in chess
MUMBAI: The ‘Queen’ is the most powerful piece in the game of chess, a two-player strategy board game that once originated in India in the 6th century. And yet, those very ‘Queens’ still stand powerless and violated in 21st century India.
Therefore, in an attempt to shed light on how a society fails when it leaves its ‘Queens’ helpless and feeble, Project Nanhi Kali partnered with WATConsult, the digital and social media agency from Dentsu Aegis Network India, to launch an innovative campaign titled, ‘Powerless Queen’ on Women’s day.
To spread awareness about the long neglected cause, a digital version of the chess game has been created wherein, the first player’s ‘Queen’ is designed to be ‘powerless’ and does not move at all while the second player’s ‘Queen’ has all her powers, thus making the first player realise how difficult it is to win a game with the ‘Powerless Queen’.
To support the campaign, Tania Sachdev, an Indian chess player who holds The Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE, also known as World Chess Federation) titles of The International Master and The Woman Grandmaster also came on board.
The campaign has become viral on social media with renounced chess player Vishwanathan Anand and others retweeting about it and taking up the Powerless Queen Challenge.
WATConsult founder and CEO Rajiv Dingra says, “As an agency, we are very proud of this campaign. Chess is a game of power and we thought of utilising this game to let people realise how in the 6th century we made the queen the most powerful and yet in the 21st century we fail to empower women. It is an absolute challenge to win any battle with a ‘Powerless Queen’ and this campaign illustrates just that on Woman’s Day.”
Apart from spreading the message, Tania Sachdev is also challenging people to play the digital version of the chess game on the microsite by taking the Powerless Queen Challenge. The microsite enables people to accept the challenge, play the game and donate to Project Nanhi Kali to empower the women of tomorrow.
Project Nanhi Kali and KC Mahindra Education Trust trustee and executive director Sheetal Mehta adds, “We are happy to partner with WATConsult for this innovative campaign. We support campaigns that give out a message about the importance of ensuring equality for women and it is a win-win situation given our objective is to educate and empower girls.”
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.
