Ad Campaigns
Blue Star earmarks Rs 35 crore for summer ad campaign
KOLKATA: Air conditioning and commercial refrigeration company, Blue Star, aims to spend Rs 35 crore during this summer on advertising and brand communication. The company has earmarked an investment of around Rs 41 crore as marketing spend for the entire next fiscal (2015-16).
The company also intends to continue investing in its digital marketing efforts in social media as well as the internet, considering that most Blue Star buyers belong to the highest socio-economic category (SEC A), who are active on the internet.
“Blue Star achieves around 40 per cent of its sale during summer season, so for our summer campaign, we aim to spend around Rs 35 crore,” said Blue Star executive director and president – AC&R Products Business B Thiagarajan.
The company unveiled a new range of contemporary, stylish and energy-efficient room air conditioners on Wednesday in Kolkata.
“Our company has identified a new value proposition of ‘Nobody Cools Better’ and soon this will be used widely with a set of TV commercials supported by advertisements in mainline dailies, cinema and hoardings. Since we are now well entrenched in the residential segment, we plan to aggressively promote this new proposition in TV, print ad hoarding,” informed Thiagarajan.
It should be noted that last year for the summer campaign, the company had earmarked Rs 25 crore in marketing spends. This summer, the company is looking at vibrant TVCs like its previous campaign ‘Daddy Cool.’ The company’s ad agency Interface has already been roped in to assist Blue Star for the TVC.
The company also plans to enhance investments on new product development and research and design initiatives in order to develop modern and sophisticated products.
Talking about the business and growth, Thiagarajan said that Blue Star is eyeing to triple the share of inverter ACs in its room air conditioner sales by 2015 as the company is underpinning its hopes on increasing preference for energy efficiency products among the buyers and falling prices of inverter ACs.
Thiagarajan also said that the room AC business was a strong focus area for the company and it would be the primary growth driver of its revenues in the coming years. “We have been encouraged by the growth in market share in this business despite the strong presence of global brands. So we have decided to invest in R&D, manufacturing and marketing to boost room AC business,” he added.
Thiagarajan further said that countries like Japan and China are moving towards inverter ACs to help save power consumption. The company plans to sell 3.4 lakh units of ACs by 2015-16 of which seven per cent would be inverter.
Last year the room air-conditioners industry grew by 10 per cent in volume terms and in value terms it was 19 per cent.
Thiagarajan also said that the company is likely to finalize a manufacturing location by July or September next fiscal as it is looking to expand its manufacturing base. “We have a capacity to manufacture four lakh AC units at present,” he concluded.
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.
