Ad Campaigns
Amitabh Bachchan joins campaign to give up LPG subsidy
NEW DELHI: Megastar Amitabh Bachchan has joined the GiveItUp movement where he will encourage people to give up the subsidy on LPG to benefit those who cannot afford it.
Acknowledging the gesture, Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said that such a noble gesture by Bachchan would surely inspire many others to join GiveItUp, a movement committed to bring smiles to millions of poor households by providing them access to clean fuel (LPG).
As on date, he said more than three million people have surrendered their LPG subsidy in response to the appeal made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 27 March.
Modi had also promised that the money saved from this effort will be utilised to provide LPG connection to poor households.
Modi had also talked about the GiveItUp movement during his recent MannKiBaat. He had mentioned, “Lakhs of families have given up their gas subsidies. These are not rich people. This is a silent revolution.”
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.
