Ad Campaigns
Earth Day campaign to focus on waste management in 45 Indian cities
KOLKATA: Earth Day, which will be celebrated on 22 April this year, is likely to be marked with innovative campaigns and contests promoting recycling, upcycling, renewables and waste management.
As many as 45 Indian cities are gearing for it. Earth Day Network country director – India Karuna Singh said that the ‘Green – It’s Our Turn to Lead’ campaign has been launched in 45 major cities of India to encourage citizens to participate and compete towards making their city clean and green.
“Earth Day commemorations are now held all across India. This year marks the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, and our programmes will focus on the global Earth Day slogan ‘It’s Our Turn to Lead’. Our endeavour will be for a green India,” Singh added.
Entries are rolling in for a variety of contests, Singh said.
“People in Chennai plan to clean up streets. In Pune, they’ve begun planting trees. ‘Clean and Green Taj’ is the goal of groups working around the Taj Mahal. NGOs in Srinagar will work with administrators to regulate traffic,” Singh informed.
In addition, strategies to make schools environment-friendly and engaging youth to step up the measures are part of this year’s celebrations.
“To reach out to consumers across India, we’re running a contest among advertising agencies to produce campaigns related to waste management, one of the major problems in India cities, in collaboration with Advertising Club Calcutta. We’ve announced an inter-media school competition across India for the best short videos on the Earth Day theme,” Singh said.
This year, the National Council of Science Museums centre in eastern India will include a competition for students to develop gadgets that run on renewable energies, Singh announced.
The high point will be the launch of the second volume of ‘Pathways to Green Cities: Innovative Ideas from Urban India’ eBook, which showcases how citizens in different cities have used innovative strategies to make their cities more sustainable with better resources and transport management, cleaner energies and reduced pollution.
Recycling and upcycling are featured prominently in the book, Singh said.
Upcycling is particular form of recycling that involves turning waste material or an unwanted product into a better quality product.
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.
