Ad Campaigns
Brands innovate I-Day campaigns
MUMBAI: Freedom is raining offers. As India enters its 70th year of independence, brands have rolled out campaigns and offers to celebrate patriotism. Brands from different sectors have innovative ways of celebrating the hard-earned freedom.
The multiplex INOX and Women in Films and Television (WIFT) are scheduled to unveil a campaign ‘Raise Your Voice’ on the eve of the Independence Day to address the gender violence issues that plague our nation. This is an exclusive tie-up wherein six short films will be screened across all INOX multiplexes in the country. With strong voices like Shabana Azmi, Priyanka Chopra, Sonam Kapoor, Diya Mirza, Shriya Saran and Rituparna Sengupta behind each campaign, WIFT also celebrates women who are strong, determined and confident. The campaign will highlight issues like dowry, sexual harassment, female foeticide, ‘teach a girl child’, child marriage and domestic violence.
Turtle Limited, the men’s wear fashion destination, has come up with a painting which is nine feet in length and five feet in height, made out of khadi thread which runs almost 20 km in length and with almost 6000 nails attached to it. The brand claims that khadi has always been close to Turtle since they are the only one who manufacture and retail the same. On this day, the brand will showcase khadi and how this journey was started by Gandhiji. Turtle intended to highlight the fabric which even the prime minister Narendra Modi is promoting along with ‘Make in India’ initiative.
Twitter India, the microblog social media platform, is adding on to the celebrations with the launch of a new tri-colour emoji featuring the map of India. The emoji would go live on a day prior to the Independence Day, at 6:30 pm IST till 6:30 am, 17 August, 2016. Indians across the world can be a part of the Independence Day conversations by using the hashtags #India #इंडिया #IndiaAt69 #भारत #IndiaIndependenceDay when composing a tweet. Twitter believes that emojis are a delightful way to bring together people to celebrate cultural moments. The emoji will give users a fun way to tweet, share and celebrate the historic day and express love for their country with live conversations. This is the second Independence Day emoji launched by Twitter. Earlier, Twitter launched the first Indian flag emoji to mark the country’s 69th Independence Day.
Canon India has partnered with SOS Children’s Village to launch ‘Support a Life’ Campaign. The brand claims to support the education and overall development of children in these villages. Canon initiated the campaign on August 12 by celebrating with the children. As part of ‘Support a Life’ initiative, Canon employees have adopted 187 children across SOS Children’s Village in the country to take responsibility of their well being.
Paytm, the mobile wallet and e-commerce website, has launched an emotional campaign themed on corruption. The ad discourages cash transactions abiding to their tagline, ‘Cash nahi Paytm karo’. The ad narrates three scenarios which seemingly look like the traditional situations where cash/bribes would ‘exchange hands’ but, in a pleasant refreshing twist, the obvious ‘exchange’ is not of cash but of warm emotions. The ad was released on YouTube on August 10.
Snapdeal, the online marketplace, has partnered for ‘India says thank you’ campaign, an initiative by 21 Fools – an organization that makes plantable paper products for a better world. Supported by Snapdeal Sunshine, the CSR initiative enables and empowers well-wishers to send a ‘happiness box’ to soldiers in the Indian Army and the Indian Navy. The boxes are sent to various site locations advised by forces and are distributed among the soldiers. These boxes contain a gratitude letter, with the sender’s name, a thank you seed paper card, a rakhi and an ‘I love India’ luggage tag. What is unique about the card is that it is infused with seeds during the pulping process and when planted can grow into herbs and plants of different varieties.
Snapdeal users have the choice to send these boxes for 10 to 100 soldiers. The brand claims more than 6000 boxes have been contributed from multiple locations in India all in less than 48 hours since the launch. Snapdeal is also building a social campaign, where people would be able to post ‘thank you’ messages for the soldiers with the hashtag- #IndiaSaysThankYou across Snapdeal’s digital platforms including Twitter and Facebook. A selection of these messages will also be sent to several soldiers along with the ‘happiness boxes’.
LINK- http://www.snapdeal.com/offers/indiasaysthankyou
Apart from the campaigns, e-commerce websites are offering special Independence Day discounts during this week. The online fashion retailer Myntra is offering between 30 and 80 per cent discount from August 13 to 15. Jabong.com is offering 20 to 70 percent discount under the Tricolor store. Shopclues is offering up to 80 percent discount on general utilities from August 9 to 15. The travel website Cleartrip.com is offering various deals on Indigo, GoAir and Air India among other airlines.
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.
