Ad Campaigns
Prime Video’s marketing triumph: Panchayat Season 3 and the humble ‘lauki’
Mumbai: Prime Video, India’s most loved entertainment destination, has once again turned heads with yet another unique marketing campaign for its upcoming Amazon Original series Panchayat season three, launching on 28 May. Following closely on the heels of a highly successful first round of a hybrid marketing campaign undertaken for the grand unveiling of the premiere date of the series, Prime Video came up with yet another novel promotional idea. Panchayat’s iconic mascot – lauki – was seen in a new and unique avatar; as giant inflatable balloons.
This campaign highlights how brilliance often lies in simplicity, turning an underestimated vegetable into a captivating symbol that grabs everyone’s attention and generates intriguing conversations, and not just Panchayat fans. The lauki’s makeover parallels the series’ narrative, where seemingly ordinary elements take on extraordinary significance. The three-day marketing campaign, carried out from 25 to 27 May, saw these gigantic lauki-shaped inflatable balloons stamped with the Panchayat premiere date, atop taxies, roaming across Mumbai, Delhi, and Jaipur. These Lauki balloons were also placed in popular public locations, creating huge buzz and anticipation about Panchayat and its new season’s premiere date. From 25 May onwards, Mumbaikars spotted them at Juhu beach and Carter Road and Jaipur residents saw them at the iconic Raj Mandir movie theatre. From 27 May onwards, the balloons are featured at crowd-pulling locations of Connaught Place and South Extension in Delhi.
A simple yet groundbreaking marketing campaign kept the fans excited, building anticipation for the return of Panchayat on Prime Video.
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.
