Ad Campaigns
Bajaj V campaign calls for Indians to celebrate national pride every day
MUMBAI: Be proud to be Indian, every day. Bajaj Auto has released a new brand film for V – the bike that contains the metal of the legendary warship INS Vikrant. The film raises an important question about why national pride is restricted to select occasions of national significance such as the Independence Day or Republic Day, and forgotten the next morning. Also, the new film features the fresh navy blue color of Bajaj V recently introduced through the new campaign.
The film aims to inspire people to cherish India’s rich and glorious history and feel a sense of pride every single day of the year. In what is probably the first time ever in Indian advertising, the story is narrated from the point of view of a real life war hero. Rear Admiral S. K. Gupta, a Mahavir Chakra awardee who served aboard the INS Vikrant in the 1971 war, features in the film and talks about how the Bajaj V now allows us to experience our pride every day.
Bajaj V, launched on the Republic Day earlier this year, created quite a stir in the market, with its first campaign – clearly establishing their distinct positioning of being made of pride.
Bajaj Auto motorcycles marketing VP Sumeet Narang said, “With the V, we are not just selling motorcycles but celebrating the pride of the nation. Consumers are also playing back this feeling of pride. The new campaign takes the proposition forward and talks about how the V helps you experience pride every day, and not just on select occasions of national significance.”
Leo Burnett CCO Rajdeepak Das said, “This is the harsh reality of our country. While we all see ourselves as proud Indians, we are quite happy just expressing them in occasions. Like beating a key rival in cricket, winning the World Cup, medals at Olympic games, and the two national days.” The film has been directed by Prakash Varma of Nirvana Films.
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.
