Ad Campaigns
BBDO India wins the Cargill mandate
Mumbai: Cargill has appointed BBDO India to manage the brand strategy and creative for their portfolio of edible oil brands.
Cargill has been striving in India since 1987, providing products such as edible oils, grains, and other verticals. Despite a competitive market fuelled by India’s high oil consumption, Cargill has managed to maintain a steady hold on its audience by offering products relevant to a variety of demographics and regions.
In recognition of BBDO India’s great work on the Gemini 2021 campaign, which challenged the age-old habit of women limiting themselves to the kitchen and never finding time to explore their full potential, Cargill made BBDO India their AOR for their edible oil brand portfolio. Now that Indian consumers are becoming more aware of their consumption habits, Cargill and BBDO will work together to identify contexts and insights that can further help make a positive impact on consumers’ lives.
Asked about the partnership, BBDO India GM and chief growth officer Nikhil Mahajan said, “The relationship between us has been built on great conversations, insightful work, and the desire to do something more than just an ad. With a unified vision and a common goal, I am certain that this partnership will lead to some great pieces of work that will always find ways to stir up a conversation with our consumers.”
BBDO India (Delhi) chief creative officer Krishna Mani added, “We are really looking forward to working with our partners at Cargill to write meaningful and impactful narratives for various brands in their portfolio.”
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.
