Ad Campaigns
Are Those Neeman’s Shoes’: An ingenious campaign to hack voice data on smartphones
Mumbai: VML, the global brand, customer experience, and commerce agency has crafted an unconventional and disruptive campaign called “Are Those Neeman’s Shoes”, its first for the digital-first footwear brand.
In a partnership that began with the idea in January 2024, Neeman’s and VML worked with The Other Half, a boutique production company, to launch an effective strategy to increase awareness and traffic to the brand’s website and reach a wider audience.
Covered widely by media over the years, it’s no secret that marketers use voice data to target consumers with ads. The campaign taps into this insight – and hacks the algorithm.
VML India CCO Mukund Olety reflected on the campaign, stating, “Challenged by a tight budget, we were thrilled to create this guerrilla-style campaign with Neeman’s. We’ve all experienced it at times. Our phones are listening to us. We’ll be talking about something and minutes later an ad for that pops up on your phone. Some find it eerie but we wanted to use that power for good – Neeman’s good, to be precise.”
“Are Those Neeman’s Shoes Phone Hack” features two influencers traversing across the country, adorned in Neeman’s Shoes, drawing attention with their loud, enthusiastic question, “Are those Neeman’s shoes?”. Trying to capture not only people’s attention but also that of their always-listening phones, the cheeky awareness campaign has hit its mark with a 19% uplift in brand search queries on Google and a strong increase in organic website sessions.
[Amar Preet Singh and Taran Chhabra, founders at Neeman’s] said of the campaign, “At Neeman’s we are constantly innovating, whether it is our products or campaigns. With the ever-evolving digital landscape, the audience expects you to deliver never-before-experienced content to entertain them. It’s in our personality to stay curious, explore, and learn new mediums of engagement that bring forth a new perspective and open up conversations with the larger community. Working with VML and The Other Half, as partners on this campaign, was a refreshing experience for their understanding of content trends and tech has truly helped us spin together a campaign that we believe will score highly on wit, and impact. With the success of the initial launch, we are already planning to bring the campaign to more cities across India – so get ready for your phone to hear: “Are those Neeman’s shoes?” in a city near you!”
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.
