Ad Campaigns
HalaPlay appoints L&K Saatchi and Saatchi as creative agency
MUMBAI: HalaPlay, a popular fantasy sports platform, has appointed L&K Saatchi & Saatchi to handle its creative duties.
The agency has rolled out a brand new campaign featuring Hardik and Krunal Pandya to promote HalaPlay’s fantasy cricket platform, playing on the importance of the ‘Bro Code’ and how this so-called sacred code can be broken when the platform’s huge winnings are at stake. The high-decibel campaign has been launched on all media platforms.
Commenting on the campaign and the agency appointment, HalaPlay co-founder Prateek Anand said, “Fantasy Sports has become a way of life for many Indians, which is where we see our exponential growth come from. At a product level, our attempt has been to put the power in the hands of our player community and create a feeling of collectivism, hence the introduction of a strong product hook, like the no platform fee for games between friends/brothers. L&K Saatchi & Saatchi helped us fuel the momentum further during the prime cricketing season by creating our first campaign, leveraging Hardik and Krunal Pandya’s cricketing skills and their mischievous brotherly chemistry.”
L&K Saatchi & Saatchi CEO and managing partner Anil Nair said, “In a cricket-crazy country like ours, everybody has their eyes and ears glued to their phones for the next three months. With an opportunity like this, our campaign aims to make a mark in their minds and engage in a way that easily resonates with them.”
Nazara Technologies Ltd chief executive officer Manish Agarwal mentioned, “We at Nazara, were looking for creative partners who can match the passion of HalaPlay founders to build a lasting legacy in the shortest possible time. The team at L&K Saatchi & Saatchi has been more than an equal match to the challenges thrown at them. This is a fantastic start to a long journey which all the teams have embarked upon and we are confident of establishing HalaPlay as a very strong consumer brand.”a
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.
