Ad Campaigns
CLab, Dentsu Impact team up for V-Mart’s latest campaign
MUMBAI: V-Mart Retail has partnered with Dentsu Impact and CLab, to launch its new campaign introducing the Bollywood pair of Ayushmann Khurrana and Bhumi Pednekar as brand ambassadors.
V-Mart Retail commenced operations in 2003 and has grown to become one of the most preferred destinations for all fashion and lifestyle needs for consumers residing in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. With a presence across 14 states with 176 stores across 148 cities, V-Mart caters to approximately four crore customers every year. According to a data compiled by Bloomberg, V-Mart, which has recently been conferred as the ‘world’s best performing department stores chain this year’, is one of the leading value-retailers of the country and caters to the aspirational middle class residing in tier-2,3 and 4 cities across India.
V-Mart Retail senior vice president of marketing and operations Snehal Shah says, “We are super-excited to associate with young talents like Ayushmann and Bhumi. We are a brand that believes in hard work, understands the requirements and dreams of the country that resides outside the reach of metros. It is these beliefs and values which make both Ayushmann and Bhumi a great fit to represent us as our brand ambassadors. Making their way into the tinsel town through sheer hard work and talent, their stories are what connects and resembles with V-Mart’s DNA and that of the millions enduring through daily struggle and yet daring to dream big.”
The association was designed by CLab, the entertainment and sports marketing arm of Dentsu Aegis Network. CLab vice president Deepak Kumar mentions, “We are extremely happy to have crafted a successful alignment between the celebrities and V-Mart. Our approach for the brand was based principally on factors of immediacy, quick recognition and response, relevancy and lastly demographic integration and acceptance.”
CLab has been set up under the mentorship of Haresh Nayak who is the managing director at Posterscope India. He says, “We have evolved from the time in which celebrity endorsements were a product of gut feeling and perception to the time which involves intelligent and scientific planning for celebrity-brand matchmaking. With Star Matrix, our proprietary celebrity recommendation tool, our vision is to bring accountability and informed decision making in a discipline which functions on probability and gut feeling of advertisers in getting celebrities/sports personalities to associate with their brands.”
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.
