AD Agencies
Amazon Ads launches AI tools to build and run campaigns in India
Two new agentic tools promise to slash the time and cost of building and running ad campaigns in India
MUMBAI Amazon Ads has thrown two agentic AI tools into the Indian market – Creative Agent and Ads Agent – and the pitch is blunt: do in hours what once took weeks, at no extra cost, and leave rivals eating algorithmic dust. The e-commerce giant is determined to democratise sophisticated advertising, handing small businesses the same firepower that until now only the biggest brands could afford.
Creative Agent, embedded within Amazon’s Creative Studio, works as a conversational AI creative partner. Click “chat” and it springs to life: researching products and audiences, brainstorming concepts, drafting multi-scene video scripts, generating images, animating scenes, laying in voiceovers and music, and spitting out finished display and video ads. The entire pipeline – from blank page to broadcast-ready creative – runs on Amazon’s own first-party signals, pulling from shopping behaviour, product-detail pages, brand stores and advertiser websites to ensure the final output resonates with real shoppers rather than just ticking creative boxes.
The tool supports multiple formats – Amazon DSP, Sponsored Display, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Brands Video and Streaming TV – and gives advertisers granular control at every stage, so they can edit everything from the overarching concept to the most minor scene detail without needing a designer or a brief. For a market stuffed with brands that have sharp products but thin creative budgets, that is a significant offer.
“AI is fundamentally changing what is possible in advertising. With Creative Agent and Ads Agent, we are giving every advertiser access to AI-powered intelligence and our insights be it a small business or an established brand. Our AI-powered tools help them create smarter, launch faster, and drive stronger business outcomes at every stage of the campaign lifecycle.” – Girish Prabhu, vice-president and head, Amazon Ads India.
The proof of concept is already in circulation. Frido, a growing Indian consumer brand, used early access to Creative Agent to run a Streaming TV campaign ahead of a sale event. Ganesh Sonawane, chief executive of Frido, is unequivocal: “Creative Agent removes that compromise entirely. We were able to launch our Streaming TV campaign for a sale event faster than ever – and the results were immediate.” The click-through rate for that campaign was 40 per cent higher than usual, Sonawane says, adding that the brand is now “testing more concepts, launching faster, and seeing stronger results, without increasing our creative spend.”
Running the numbers
The second tool, Ads Agent, tackles the unglamorous grind of campaign management. Currently live within Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and heading to Amazon Ads Campaign Manager later this year, it automates the tasks that consume disproportionate hours: identifying audience segments, adjusting pacing across hundreds of simultaneous campaigns, and generating SQL queries for advanced analytics – all through plain-language conversation rather than lines of code.
Advertisers can upload a custom media plan and let Ads Agent construct a campaign structure and ad groups. The tool then reviews thousands of audience segments to surface the most relevant Amazon audiences and keywords, serves them up for human review, and applies approved choices at scale. For AMC users, it translates business questions into complex SQL queries in real time, collapsing what was once a specialist task into a conversational exchange.
Amazon frames both tools as part of a broader full-funnel advertising proposition that already spans Prime Video, Amazon MX Player and third-party publishers, with generative AI now stitched throughout the creative and campaign layer. The company claims that combining first-party shopping signals with agentic AI delivers “accuracy and depth that drives real business outcomes” – a claim Frido’s 40 per cent CTR uplift lends at least some early credibility to.
AD Agencies
JioStar study with BARC and Nielsen finds TV and digital ads reach different audiences during T20 World Cup
JioStar’s T20 World Cup data shows cross-screen duplication below 10 per cent, setting the stage for a blockbuster IPL
MUMBAI: The numbers are in, and they are striking. During the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026, television and digital advertising campaigns barely stepped on each other’s toes. Cross-screen audience duplication stayed below 10 per cent across every participating campaign, a finding that upends the assumption that brands paying for both screens are largely paying twice to reach the same eyeballs.
JioStar, the media giant that broadcast the tournament across television and digital platforms, on Tuesday unveiled the findings from BARC | Nielsen One Ads, a cross-screen measurement solution deployed for the first time at scale during the World Cup. The verdict: TV and digital are not cannibalising each other. They are reaching fundamentally different people.
The study found that digital platforms are delivering genuinely incremental audiences, viewers who would not have been reached on television alone, while enabling more precise targeting across devices. The combined effect gives advertisers what the industry has long craved: a unified, deduplicated four-screen audience that marries the blunt-instrument scale of television with the surgical precision of digital.
“The ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 has once again demonstrated the power of scale in live sports, and these findings take it a step further by quantifying how that scale translates across screens,” said Anup Govindan, head of sales, sports, JioStar. “With less than 10 per cent duplication, we now have clear, measurable evidence of how integrated planning delivers both efficiency and impact for advertisers. As we look ahead to IPL 2026, this sets a strong foundation for brands to plan with greater confidence, leveraging cross-screen strategies to maximise reach and effectiveness at scale.”
The methodology behind the findings stitches together two measurement giants. BARC India supplies linear television data; Nielsen brings its digital measurement capabilities across connected TV, mobile and desktop. The result is a single, deduplicated view of campaign reach and frequency, the kind of unified currency that advertisers have been demanding as audiences scatter across screens.
The timing is deliberate. As consumption habits splinter, viewers flicking between the living-room set, the smartphone on the sofa and the laptop at the kitchen table, the case for unified measurement has grown urgent. A brand buying a 30-second slot on Star Sports and a pre-roll on JioCinema can now know, with some rigour, whether those two buys are actually compounding their reach or merely doubling their spend.
JioStar, BARC India and Nielsen say the learnings will directly inform cross-screen strategies for upcoming tentpole events. IPL 2026 is next. If the World Cup data holds, and there is little reason to think it will not, brands that treat television and digital as a single, coordinated buy rather than two separate line items will arrive at the auction with a sharper pencil and a cleaner brief. In India’s ferociously competitive advertising market, that edge is everything.
