Ad Campaigns
Kirloskar campaign recognises ‘smile of joy’
MUMBAI: Leading industrial engineering group, Kirloskar Group has been a silent yet successful enterprise touching the lives of many Indians every day. The brand is salient, and awareness about the group is quite high. However, what is not so well known is the fact that the brand touches our lives and it makes the world a comfortable place to live.
Almost all the Kirloskar products are intermediate products and hence one never gets to see them in action. And when they work silently and reliably, one does not even notice their existence. However, the wide range of engineering products by Kirloskar play an integral part in everyone’s life.
To communicate this thought, an ‘Omnipresent’ campaign was run last year which showed how Kirloskar touches one’s life at different stages, silently and reliably. Enhancing this thought further, Lowe Lintas, Pune conceived another campaign that communicates how it brings joy and enriches lives across customer segments. The campaign has been developed based on the insight that when you work silently and reliably behind the scenes, the only recognition that you get is the ‘smile of joy’ that you bring. Thus the campaign idea of ‘Reverse Chain of Smiles’ was born.
Commenting on the campaign, Madhav Chandrachud, President, Kirloskar Proprietary Limited said, “This is the sixth year of Kirloskar brand campaign in India and starting from ‘Engineering High-ground’ to ‘Positive Transformation’ to ‘The Invisible Yet Omnipresent’, the agency team has handled the communication seamlessly. Especially for engineering products, it’s critical that the communication is interesting enough for everyone to relate to. Also, the viewers need to emotionally connect with the brand without being burdened with the complex product stories. And when the brand is the leader, it needs to have a tone that steers clear of chest-thumping. We are happy to have a like-minded agency, partner us shoulder the brand custodianship over the years.”
Rendered in reverse, the new campaign shows how with its wide range of products working across key sectors, Kirloskar brings a smile of joy on every face and, how one smile leads to another forming a chain of smiles. Starting from refrigeration compressors for ice-cream, to generator sets powering the telecom industry, to pumps that bring water for a bumper crop, Kirloskar is behind a million smiles, working silently and reliably.
Speaking on the campaign thought, Vasudha Narayanan, Executive Creative Director, Lowe Lintas said: “Kirloskar is a great brand. Very few brands command so much respect and trust from consumers. That’s why it was important for us to capture this trust and yet stand out. Tracking the source of a kid’s smile from an ice-cream to a field gave us the opportunity. The treatment might look simple, but it was quite challenging, both creatively and technically. A commercial in reverse is not something that you see or make every day. It was quite a challenge and fun to script, visualize, shoot and edit this film. Both creatively and technically.”
The campaign will run on popular News and Infotainment channels and will be spread across two phases. The first phase begins from the first week of June and will run till August 2017. The second phase will commence from November 2017 to February 2018.
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.
