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Havas Play announces strategic partnership with sports marketing agency, Gameplan Sports
Mumbai: Havas Play, the sports, entertainment, and content agency of Havas Media Network India, has entered a strategic partnership with one of the oldest sports marketing companies in the country, Gameplan Sports Pvt. Ltd, which aims to bring together the expertise and capabilities of both agencies.
The partnership will entail managing athletes, major sports league in cricket, football, badminton, kabaddi, tennis, table tennis, golf, marathons, chess, and others. It will also include sports events like tournaments, competitions, exhibitions, matches, displays and more. The alliance will also include sports media services like media consulting, strategy, execution, sponsorship, and creating Ips in the space of content and entertainment.
Talking about the new venture, Havas India group CEO Rana Barua said, “At Havas India we place our clients at the heart of our growth journey. Our ecosystem is built and tailored to meet their business needs and to empower them. Earlier this year, Havas launched a new global agency Havas Play – uniting sports, content, culture, and entertainment expertise under one agency. In India, the booming sports sector, which goes much beyond cricket, has become increasingly crucial for brands and marketers and is quite under leveraged. Havas Play along with Gameplan will help brands explore the vast potential of this untapped market. This makes us a formidable player creating distinctive and impactful opportunities for brands and businesses.”
Gameplan Sports Pvt Ltd director Jeet Banerjee and Havas Media India president – investments and Havas Play MD R Venkatsubramanian will collaborate to construct and build this strategic alliance and jointly pursue this new venture.
Havas Media Network India CEO Mohit Joshi said, “The Indian sports sector is currently thriving with a surge in interest and funding, reflected in double-digit growth and an increased sports budget this fiscal. This underscores the growing opportunities which are lying untapped. With Havas Play and Gameplan coming together, brands and marketers can explore their unique capability to leverage this burgeoning market. This alliance further strengthens our meaningful media capability to provide tailored business solutions to our clients, through sports properties and unique Ips.”
Banerjee said, “Gameplan is one of the oldest sports marketing companies in the country. We turn 25 this year and have left our footprint across several verticals in the sports industry. Our legacy spans across numerous sectors within the sports industry, catalysing innovations that have since become industry standards, from revolutionary 3D signage to transforming chess into a riveting spectator experience. Beyond sports, we’ve ventured into literature, cinema, and the arts over the past decade, notably shaping the cultural landscape with the Kolkata Literary Meet, a cornerstone event on India’s cultural calendar. We take pride in our agility, innovation, and boundless imagination. In collaboration with Havas Play, we embark on an exciting journey, leveraging their extensive activities and cross-market exposure. Together, we aim to elevate our existing intellectual properties and forge powerful new ventures in sports and beyond.”
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.
