Ad Campaigns
Biggest advertisers on television during first eleven weeks of 2017
BENGALURU: The Music genre represented solely by Indian music company Super Cassettes Industries (Super Cassettes) was the third largest TV advertiser in terms of ad insertions during the first eleven weeks of 2017. The biggest TV advertising genre is of course a cliché – the FMCG genre followed by the confectionary genre represented also by a sole player – Cadburys India Ltd., (Cadburys). As a matter of fact, all the genres except for FMCG were represented by one advertiser only in the weekly top 10 list.
Analysis of Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC) weekly data of top 10 Advertiser *Across Genre: All India (U+R): 4+ Individuals, shows that 18 advertisers from five genres were present at least once (frequency) in the eleven weekly lists of top 10 advertisers
This paper must be read with a caveat: It deals only with the players present in Broadcast Audience Research Councilof India (BARC) top 10 lists of advertisers and brandsper week. The sums/percentages of other advertisers/brands other than those indicated in BARC’s top 10 lists have not been considered/mentioned in this paper during the period under consideration and those numbers could be more/higher. Combined weekly insertions represent the total number of insertions of an advertiser or a brand or a genre during the eleven week period under consideration in this paper.
Cadburys was present in the top 10 advertisers list during all the first 11 eleven weeks of 2017 with combined weekly insertions of 2,51,468.
Super Cassettes was present in BARC’s list for 9 of the first 11 weeks of 2017. FMCG companies occupied 83 of the possible 110 spots during the period. The Food & Beverages genre represented again by a sole entrant – Coca Cola India Ltd was present in the list for 3 weeks, the online genre represented by Amazon Online India Pvt Ltd (Amazon) and the politics genre represented by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were present in the list for two weeks each. Please refer to the figure below for the combined weekly impressions of each genre.
13 FMCG brands were present in the weekly top 10 advertisers list during the first 11 weeks of 2017. As is obvious from the chart, the combined weekly insertions of 29,43,407 by the top FMCG advertisers exceeds the next genre – Confectionarywhich had combined insertions of 2,51,468 by a factor of almost 12 and that of the third genre –Music with combined weekly insertions of 1,68,686 by a factor exceeding 17.
Among the advertisers, FMCG major Hindustan Lever Limited (Lever) was by far the largest advertiser that was present at the pole position during all the first 11 weeks of 2017. Lever had combined weekly insertions of 11,49,665 during the period under consideration. FMCG player Reckitt Benckiser (India) Ltd (Reckitt Benckiser) was the second largest advertiser during the first eleven weeks of 2017 with 5,35,862 ad insertions followed by Patanjali Ayurved Limited with 3,10,749 insertions. 5 advertisers – four from the FMCG genre and one from the confectionary genre,were present in the top 10 advertisers lists during all the 11 weeks of 2017. Please refer to the chart below.
To clarify the ads by the FMCG genre further – during every minute of every day during the first 11 weeks of 2017, about 26.54 FMCG ads were beamed. If one were to break this into insertions of only 10 second duration each– every 60 seconds during the first 11 weeks of 2017 witnessed at least 265.46 seconds of FMCG ad duration on some TV channel or the other.
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.
