Ad Campaigns
HDFC Home Loans stirs childhood memories with #BackToBachpan
MUMBAI: French philosopher Gaston Bachelard had rightly said, “Like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.” We often find ourselves looking out for little instances that take us back to our childhood. Understanding this sentiment, HDFC Home Loans has hooked in their online patrons with a digital Children’s Day campaign that calls on everyone to go #backtobachpan.
Through an online contest carried out on their Twitter page, the brand gave opportunity to everyone to relive their childhood by posting pictures, instances and messages that give a glimpse of what childhood means to them. No sooner did the post go live, then people poured in with tweets with #backtobachpan.
From pictures of their younger self doing goofy things, rubber eraser names old black and whites, twitterati were seen enthusiastically sharing their #backtobachpan moments, making the hashtag trend throughout the day in India.
Some of the responses are both funny as well as moving.
“Take me #BackToBachpan where i used to write my name on bench to mark it as my bench,” tweets batman_baklol, while Kanchan Negi (coool_kashish) recalls how her childhood was checkered by memories of visit to her grandmother’s place during vacations.
Not only were the replies engaging, the brand went a step ahead in engaging with those who posted for the contest by creating animated caricature pictures of the twitteratti, taking cue from their posts.
This isn’t the first time a brand has played on our heart strings with an innovative campaign on Children’s Day. In fact, Shopperstop ran a similar contest titled #BringBackTheKid last year, while Paper Boat’s inspiring TVC ‘When I grow up..”by EmotionalFulls, still remains fresh in our memory.
On that note, here’s hoping that we keep our inner child alive. Happy Children’s Day!
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.
