Ad Campaigns
Election tracker: Cricket over News
The upcoming election is not just being fought on the ground; political parties have laid siege to airwaves as well.
So much so, followers of the ICC Twenty20 World Cup will vouch for the fact that ‘commercial breaks’ are beginning to resemble the battle cry of the main contenders as they unleash newer segments of their respective campaigns on unsuspecting viewers.
Not without reason for in a country where cricket is religion, the ‘clever’ agencies behind these rival campaigns are only putting their money where their mouth is.
And so we have the Congress continuing to showcase all the good work done in the past decade, with the common man always at the centre, even in the new TVCs. While BJP changes its hitherto serious tone and takes a dig at the Congress in a rather comical way. Whether the saffron party has diluted the message it wants to send out is something the audience may continue to debate but one way or the other, cricket comes across as a critical component of the election strategy.
Speaking of reach, daily soaps on general entertainment channels are watched by a majority of women in the country. With women forming 49 per cent of the voting population, the main players in this election can least afford to ignore this format. Neither can they shrug off the growing importance of digital platforms; especially in an election year when there will be close to 12 crore first-time voters, most of them always online. Hence, political outfits, even the likes of CPI (M), are pulling out all stops to woo the youth in the virtual world to get them to cast their vote in the real world.
Surprisingly however, news channels are still untouched by the flurry of political advertisements. In case you’re wondering why, news channels don’t enjoy the kind of reach that other television channels, say GECs, do. Then again, eyeballs will flow to news channels closer to the election dates for news and analyses. Maybe, that’s when the ad blitzkrieg will hit these channels as well…
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.
