Ad Campaigns
Amitabh Bachchan & Priyanka Chopra replace Aamir Khan as ‘Incredible India’ brand ambassadors
MUMBAI: Bollywood stalwart Amitabh Bachchan and India’s new international face Priyanka Chopra have been named as the brand ambassadors for Government of India’s ‘Incredible India’ campaign, making it the first time that the government has appointed actors.
The endorsement agreement will be for a period of three years and the official announcement is likely to be made after 26 January.
To date, Bachchan has been the face of many social campaigns like Gujarat Tourism, Polio Eradication Drive, Hepatitis B etc. Chopra, on the other hand, has made leaps and bounds in her career in recent years. Apart from being applauded in the roles she portrays in Hindi films, she also made headway in Hollywood by debuting as the lead in ABC’s television series Quantico and is also the first South Asian actor to win the Favourite Actress in a New TV series award at this year’s People’s Choice Awards.
The duo replaces erstwhile brand ambassador Aamir Khan, who had been roped in by the creative agency working on the campaign – McCann Worldwide.
It may be recalled that Khan was in the eye of the storm late last year, over his ‘intolerance’ remarks, which were blown out of proportion as well as quoted out of context in the media. Khan was the face of the ‘Athithi Devo Bhava’ campaign for almost a decade.
Earlier this month, the Ministry of Tourism had denied removing Khan as ‘Incredible India’ brand ambassador in a statement. In response to media reports citing that Khan would no longer be endorsing the campaign in light of the ‘intolerance’ controversy that broke out late last year, the Tourism Ministry clarified that “there is no change in the stand of the ministry in this matter.”
The Ministry further clarified that at present it had a contractual agreement with creative agency McCann Worldwide to produce social awareness campaign and it was the agency, which had an agreement with Khan.
However, a senior bureaucrat Amitabh Kant, who was a key figure in implementing the campaign during his tenure with the Ministry of Tourism, earlier justified the government’s decision to remove the actor from the portfolio.
At that time, Khan, on his part, had said, “Whether I am brand ambassador or not, India will remain Incredible, and that’s the way it should be.”
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.
