Ad Campaigns
YouTube encourages women to tickle your funny bone
MUMBAI: YouTube Space has partnered with WhoHaHa and Elizabeth Banks to celebrate and empower women around the world through comedy through the #FindYourFunny series. With the help of professionally designed sets and assistance from trained production crews provided by the team at YouTube Space, YouTube creators will be invited to create epic female-driven comedy videos over a twelve-week period.
Designed to foster female comedic talent on YouTube, the production program aims to inspire and support female storytellers, who use comedy as a medium for opportunity and change. Indian mentors Aahana Kumra and Jamie Lever came together for a fun mentorship session with five wonderful female creators – Blush, Slayypoint, Dhwani Bhatt, TheoryandStrings and Heli_Ved, who come together for a fun session. The first leg of the series also saw prominent names including Bollywood writer Disha Rindani, theatre/TV and film actor Namit Das andcinematographer/director Siddharth Vasani bringing in their expertise to help Indian creators ideate, conceptualise and think out-of-the-box.
Elizabeth Banks says, “At WhoHaha we believe it’s not only important but essential for women to have a platform to be able to share their voices and creativity and that’s why we’re excited to be teaming up with YouTube Space on this initiative that’s providing such a ground-breaking opportunity to creators all over the world.”
The program has been launched in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, Rio, Paris, Berlin, London, Tokyo, and Mumbai. As part of the partnership, WhoHaha and Elizabeth Banks will provide creative consultation and mentorship for creators. Select creators from across YouTube spaces will get a chance to work closely with WhoHaHa and Elizabeth Banks to produce their respective YouTube series pilot.
In 2015, YouTube Space launched its first initiative to spotlight creators who catalyse more female-driven content on YouTube for global audiences to enjoy. This year’s program marks a continuation of these efforts tied to one of the most powerful of genres in entertainment: comedy.
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.
