Ad Campaigns
HDFC Life’s latest ad is a shoutout to ‘Covid Batch’ of students
Mumbai: One of the biggest setbacks of the Covid-19 pandemic was the shutdown of educational institutions. Keeping this in mind, HDFC Life has unveiled a new brand campaign crafted by Leo Burnett, from the lens of a graduating school girl. The brand campaign is available across television, digital and DTH.
The film ‘BounceBack Batch’ highlights the challenges faced by students as they lost out on classroom learning, interpersonal skill-building and some of the best days of their lives. With this campaign, the brand attempts to throw light on the story of every student out there during this pandemic. The film depicts how graduating in these uncertain times is a testament to their resilience which makes the current batch of students stand out from every other batch.
“Our film takes the audience on an emotional journey of the turmoil that these champions had to go through and the resilience they have shown in the face of the worst adversity humankind has ever seen. They have persevered and bounced back stronger from this challenge,” said Leo Burnett CEO and chief creative officer – South Asia Rajdeepak Das.
“The last two years have been difficult for everyone. But the part that stands out is the bigger story about the resilience demonstrated by these students and their families,” stated HDFC Life head of marketing, digital business, and e-commerce Vishal Subharwal. “With this campaign, we aim to drive this realisation and the importance of financial planning through a student’s lens, instilling a sense of pride in parents who have ensured that their children overcome the challenges posed by the pandemic.”
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.
