Ad Campaigns
Dentsu Webchutney’s #HappyHourRewind concept; clocks up happiness
MUMBAI: Coming fresh out of the Dentsu Webchutney Innovation Labs, a subsidiary of the Dentsu India Group, is a campaign that gives the over abused category of Happy Hours a much needed twist. Launched at Turquoise Cottage, a youngsters frequented pub, #HappyHoursRewind allowed people to, simply, turn back time. With a quick tweet, they could rewind the clock and make sure that happy hours never ended!
“Hundreds of bars all over the world run the same old schemes of extending Happy Hours, which begs the question – what does a bar have to do to stand out?” said Dentsu Webchutney Innovation Labs chief creative technologist Gurbaksh Singh.
Elucidating on the campaign he said, “The aim was to infuse freshness into the concept of ‘Happy Hours’ through technology. For this idea, we experimented with an old school analogue clock, and integrated it with the digital sphere through twitter. We hacked into the clock and engineered it to move anti-clockwise when specific tweets were sent, giving us a way to rewind time.”
This campaign received more than 250 tweets in a single night, and resulted in Happy Hours going on till midnight even though the clock still showed 9pm!
The installation was set up in Turquoise Cottage and patrons were invited between 7pm – 9 pm to tweet with their views on ‘Why happy hours shouldn’t end’ using hashtag #Happyhoursrewind.
This is a pilot campaign that was undertaken at Saket outlet and will be replicated at other locations too, shortly.
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.
