Ad Campaigns
Cannes Lions 2022: Decoding Pixel Party’s award-winning campaign
Mumbai: A wholly independent Indian content and experience company and one of the key partners behind the ‘The Unfiltered History Tour’ campaign Pixel Party has created history at the Cannes Lions: The International Festival of Creativity. This is the first time an India based firm has won the highest number of Lions, including a Titanium Lion, three Grand Prix, one Gold Lion, four Silver Lions and three Bronze Lions. This stellar campaign was created by Dentsu Webchutney and Pixel Party, thus creating an unparalleled interactive tour of the British Museum using augmented reality technology.
Being the most awarded campaign at Cannes Lions 2022, ‘the Unfiltered History Tour’ captures the story of the British Museum’s stolen artefacts. For this award-winning campaign, Pixel Party developed the filters for the British museum tour by using the first of its kind technology – LiDAR (light detection ranging), which was employed to create a dynamic auto adapting Instagram filter that blends satellite data with augmented reality, to account for changing lighting conditions in the Museum.
Using Instagram augmented reality filters, visitors can scan the museum’s disputed artefacts and see them being teleported back in time to their countries of origin. It also relays violent moments in history with the help of ten experts from those countries. The visuals were inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s black and white films and were designed to match the emotional stories told by the experts.
Pixel Party founder and director Kalpit Dwivedi said, “This has been one of the most exciting and rewarding journeys for us. The entire process of creating an immersive experience was fascinating and challenging. It forced us to think out of the box and tackle unique situations, and we are very proud of the results. Working with a hardcore creative advertising technologist like Gurbaksh Singh (chief innovation officer of Dentsu Creative) was very thrilling and inspiring. Technology enables more powerful, impactful storytelling. So, we decided to try this using a social platform that can build a rich experience for every user – which is how Instagram’s augmented reality filters became part of this project.”
Pixel Party director Sumit Grover said, “Executing this entire campaign took almost 18 months and the entire journey was exhilarating. It feels truly incredible to be recognized on the biggest international stage. From the entire team that poured their heart into crafting this campaign, this is our commitment to further discourse that will make room for underrepresented voices in the industry. Well, it’s been a long journey and now it’s getting the rewards that it truly deserves”
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.
