Ad Campaigns
Amitabh Bachchan partners with GSK for shingles awareness and prevention
Mumbai: GSK has announced a partnership with actor Amitabh Bachchan to raise awareness about shingles, a painful condition that affects one out of three adults above the age of 50 years.
The campaign film evocatively captures the agonising pain caused by shingles and its debilitating impact on the people living with it. It gives an important message that it is possible to protect aging adults against this pain through vaccination.
Commenting on the partnership, Bachchan said, “Shingles are known to be painful and thus certainly a setback to senior citizens. For prevention against Shingles, I recommend the Senior Citizens to talk to their doctors.”
Shingles is caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox. The virus remains inactive in the body after a person recovers from it. When the immunity of the body weakens, it re-activates to cause shingles. More than 90 per cent of Indians by the age of 50 years have this virus in their body and are vulnerable to shingles.
GSK medical director Rashmi Hegde said, “Amitabh Bachchan has been the face of several disease and vaccination awareness campaigns before, and his support has motivated people to take the required action to prevent these diseases. Today, India’s aging population is rising, and we need to make them aware of diseases such as shingles which can impact their quality of life. We believe this will persuade more people to talk to their doctors about protecting themselves or their loved ones from shingles.”
The film has been conceptualised and executed by Lowe Lintas. The creative focus is on capturing the intensity of the shingles pain through powerful metaphors and images. The representation of pain is based on scientifically documented patient testimonies.
Commenting on the creative insight for the film, Lowe Lintas CCO 9 (Global Brands) Sagar Kapoor said, “Our challenge was to find a way to ‘show’ the unbearable pain of shingles, a sensation that can only be ‘felt’. That is why we have made use of imagery such as sharp nails piercing the body or a person getting electric shocks. We do not want to scare people, but we want to make them aware that Shingles can be extremely painful, and it can be prevented.”
The video will be released on multiple platforms such as YouTube, Television, Print and other social media.
Mr. Bachchan talks about Shingles – a very painful disease | MyVaccinationHub | Hindi | 45s
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.
