Ad Campaigns
Asian Paints goes prime time with Tamil TV-inspired colour guide
MUMBAI: What do Tamil prime-time serials and your next wall colour have in common? Quite a lot, if Asian Paints has anything to say about it.
The paint and décor giant has launched Tractor Emulsion Varnamaalai, a first-of-its-kind shade guide for Tamil Nadu inspired by the vivid sets and characters of popular Tamil TV serials like Kayal, Moondru Mudichu and Singapenne. With the visual flair of leading ladies such as Chaitra Reddy, Swathi Konde and Maneesha Mahesh fronting the guide in full character, Asian Paints brings 65 curated colour combos straight from the screen to your home.
Cleverly titled Varnamaalai—Tamil for “garland of colours”—the guide features palettes lifted from living rooms, staircases and bedrooms of beloved serials that collectively reach over 41 million viewers a month. It’s smart, striking, and steeped in local flavour.
Speaking on the launch, Asian Paints Ltd. MD & CEO, Amit Syngle shared, “At Asian Paints, we understand that colour is both a deeply emotional and cultural choice. With Tractor Emulsion Varna Maalai, we’ve transformed that understanding into a truly local and meaningful offering. This shade guide gives consumers in Tamil Nadu a relatable tool to imagine their homes through the familiar lens of characters and settings they see every day. It makes colour selection more intuitive, personal, and inspiring — and reflects our ongoing effort to democratise décor through innovations rooted in culture.”
Designed around its bestselling Tractor Emulsion, known for anti-fade performance and a four-year warranty, Varnamaalai includes room-wise stencils, styling tips and finish options to help home-owners visualise real spaces with star-approved flair.
Speaking at the launch, actors Reddy, Konde, and Mahesh shared their thoughts on the shade guide, “Varnamaalai is a beautiful and brilliant offering. Choosing the right colours for your home is often overwhelming, but seeing combinations brought to life through TV serials we watch every day makes the process simple and real. We can’t think of a better brand than Asian Paints to lead and guide this journey.”
The guide is available at Asian Paints dealer outlets, online, or via SMS. Send “Tractor” to 56161 and have the shades of Tamil Nadu’s biggest blockbusters delivered to your doorstep.
It’s colour with character—and a little bit of daily soap drama.
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.
