Ad Campaigns
Freecharge onboards Jaideep Ahlawat for its latest IPL campaign
Mumbai: Freecharge, digital financial services platform has launched its new ad campaign “Pay Kar Befikar” for Indian Premier League (IPL) season 16. The Ad features actor Jaideep Ahlawat, who appeared in multiple series in 2022 and was highly praised for his performance in the web series Paatal Lok and popular Bollywood films.
The new TVC of Freecharge featuring Bollywood/OTT star Jaideep Ahlawat had been launched during the IPL and the Ad will be actively promoted through IPL season 16, across the JioCinema OTT platform and other digital platforms. In its latest Ad, Freecharge unleashed an unseen ‘Shayrana Andaaz’ of the action hero Jaideep Ahlawat. From memes to brand engagement to discourse on social media, with its launch, the campaign name “Pay Kar Befikar” has become a trending hashtag on social media platforms.
Jaideep is shown in the commercial sharing the benefits of Freecharge UPI & Pay Later and encouraging customers to use the products to claim cashback and rewards. With the new Ad campaign, Freecharge aims to deepen customer engagement of its holistic offering across payments & lending products and instill confidence in customers to live ‘Befikar’ without worrying about payments.
Freecharge CMO and head of growth Shweta Singhal said, “IPL has always been an excellent platform for brands to grab cricket fans’ interest. This is a great time to interact with customers to foster brand awareness. We are extremely excited with our association with actor Jaideep Ahlawat as a new face for our Ad campaign, around the theme ‘Pay Kar Befikar’. The campaign talks about the easy payment and credit options offered by Freecharge to its consumers and the product’s versatility across QR, POS, and online channels. I believe the TVC will resonate with our customers, fuelling the growth of UPI and Pay Later products. This Ad campaign during IPL will help us to position Freecharge as a one-stop-solution for payment and credit needs. “
Freecharge will also be introducing several contests on its social media handles for its customers and the lucky customers will get a chance to win exciting gifts & cashback.
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.
