Ad Campaigns
Britannia tests friendship in latest campaign for Bourbon
MUMBAI: Britannia has launched a new campaign, Bourbon Friends Forever (BFF) for one of its most loved brands, Bourbon.
With an aim to refresh the brand, Britannia Bourbon’s latest campaign celebrates the true spirit of life-long best friends. As the next leg to this mega campaign, Bourbon has just launched a series starring two of India’s biggest digital content creators and comedy artists Abish Mathew and Mallika Dua.
Bourbon Friendly Matches brings these two YouTube heavyweights on a stage where they both have to prove their friendship by taking a 7-step challenge, each challenge testing an attribute of their friendship which we have arrived at after intense consumer research. The games are designed in such fun, simple ways that it encourages viewers to try the same with their friends.
Britannia Industries VP of marketing Ali Harris Shere says, “Through this new campaign, the brand wants to create a world of friendship that is real and unpretentious. Although the new web series caters more to the youth, our target audience is not constrained by age, as this feeling of friendship cuts across all ages including adults for whom moments spent with their best friends is a pivot on which their life revolves. We want to find a place in each friends’ group and this campaign is our first salvo in that direction.”
JWT Bangalore executive creative director Priya Shivakumar adds, “For this campaign, we decided to have a set of fun challenges that test one’s friendship with their BFF. To bring this alive we decided to look for two young internet icons who spoke the language of the youth. Two of them who were also BFF’s. Our search ended with Abish and Mallika – two stand-up comedians and darlings of the internet with huge follower bases, and BFFs in real life. They fit the bill perfectly. The beauty of this 7-part challenge is that not only does it make you laugh out loud, but also urges you to prove your friendship with your BFF by taking those challenges.”
As a brand which has been around for years, Britannia Bourbon recognised the need for a revamp. Drawing inspiration from the product which is loved by so many people for its ability to satiate both the heart (chocolaty taste) and stomach, the brand saw an opportunity to connect it to a key aspect of life that is as fulfilling as – ‘Real Friendships’. The brand re-defined itself in the context of this friendship and connected it to people whose lives are centred around their friends and have designed a campaign that is built on the fulfilling moments shared between best friends.
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.
