Ad Campaigns
Dream11’s star-studded campaign yields record concurrency on IPL 2025 Day one
MUMBAI: Dream11 has kicked off the IPL season with a bang, smashing records faster than a Hardik Pandya six. The fantasy cricket platform registered an admiration worthy 16.5m concurrent users during the tournament opener between Kolkata Knight Riders and Royal Challengers Bangalore—testament to a marketing campaign that began brewing in the boardroom nearly eight months ago.
Dream11 chief marketing officer Vikrant Mudaliar orchestrated what industry insiders describe as a “logistical hat-trick” by corralling Bollywood heavyweights Ranbir Kapoor and Aamir Khan alongside cricketing royalty Rohit Sharma, Hardik Pandya, Rishabh Pant and Suryakumar Yadav for this season’s television commercial.
The campaign’s central question—”Aap key team mein kaun?” (Who’s in your team?)—taps into the very essence of fantasy cricket while resonating with fans across the subcontinent. With Dream11 already boasting 240m users, Mudaliar’s sights are firmly set on the next 100m cricket-mad Indians.
“We needed a reach of 500-600 million,” he revealed to Storyboard18. “Only cricket and the IPL and Indian cinema combined can deliver that level of exposure.” The campaign, directed by Nitesh Tiwari of Dangal fame, required military-precision planning with multiple sets, parallel shoots and a complex scheduling ballet to accommodate the stars’ limited availability.
The adverts, filmed over several days in party settings, in planes, showcase something rarely seen in Indian advertising: self-deprecation from genuine celebrities. “The ability to poke fun at oneself requires a certain maturity,” noted Mudaliar. “Much of the humour came from the celebrities themselves.”
Such starry productions don’t come cheap, with budgets reportedly running into crores. However, Dream11 has optimised its marketing spend by stepping back from co-presenting sponsorship of IPL broadcasts, instead betting big on creative quality.
The strategy appears to be paying dividends. While Amit Sharma, chief technology officer, and his team work feverishly behind the scenes to keep the platform running smoothly under unprecedented traffic on Day 1 of the IPL as Virat Kohli blasted RCB to a victory over reigning champions KKR, Dream11’s war room is celebrating a return on investment that even the shrewdest fantasy cricket player would envy.
As Vikrant might say: when you’ve got the Hitman, Pandya, Sky, Rishabh, Aamir Khan and Ranbir Kapoor on your team sheet, century-making becomes considerably easier.
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.
