Ad Campaigns
Absolut Glassware launches its all new pride campaign “Be an #AbsolutAlly”
Mumbai: The brand has always believed in a world without biases and promoted inclusivity and diversity, which lie at the core of its principles. As a testament to its philosophy, the brand has supported the LGBTQIA+ community for over 40 years, encouraging individuals to express themselves freely. This pride month, Absolut Glassware launches its first ever Pride campaign in India – ‘Be an #AbsolutAlly’.
The campaign was developed following in-depth interactions with diverse people from within the LGBTQIA+ community in India to understand their lived experiences, stories and perspectives. This was further aligned with a deeper cultural and digital scan. The big learning from the research was that despite progress being made on the legal front, little has changed at the societal and familial level for the community. Even though there is some representation in pop culture, there is still a fair bit of ignorance towards the realities of queer people in India. Hence, the need to sensitise cis-het people and enable them to be stronger and more trustworthy allies of the LGBTQIA+ community became the need of the hour. Therein, the idea of being an #AbsolutAlly was born.
The campaign has been co-created with 10 voices chosen from across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum including names such as Dutee Chand, Durga Gawde, Patruni Sastry, Jay Anand, Alex Matthew, Aniruddha Mahale, Maitrayanee Mahanta, Anwesh Sahoo and Anjali Lama. It features their own real-life stories narrated by them in a candid fashion, covering topics such as family acceptance, the usage of pronouns and other assumptions and stereotypes that the community often faces. Additionally, the campaign features personal anecdotes to highlight instances where they felt a lack of support and the absence of a strong ally in their life.
An important aspect of the #AbsolutAlly campaign is to walk the talk and create a meaningful impact for the community in the club and bar ecosystem that the brand inhabits. To manifest this, Absolut Glassware has collaborated with Mr Bartender & The Crew, India’s first bar academy for women (especially those from less privileged backgrounds, victims of human trafficking, and ex-prison inmates) and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, to create safe spaces through sensitization workshops across the country. This initiative kicks off in January 2023 and aims to be an on-going program targeting 100 bars in its first leg.
Absolut Glassware is also conducting Pride nights in key metros Delhi, Mumbai, Goa, Gurgaon, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Kolkata. The intent is to celebrate members of the LGBTQIA+ community and their allies. The brand aims to make the nights memorable and celebratory with drag performances and artists from the community.
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.
