Ad Campaigns
Hercules rolls out new campaign with Rishabh Pant
Mumbai: India’s leading cycle brand, Hercules, has launched a new campaign with cricketer Rishabh Pant. Hercules stands for teamwork, friendship, and adventure. It encourages boys to team up with like-minded friends and set off on an adventure with them in the spirit of brotherhood.
Designed and executed by Ogilvy Bangalore, the latest campaign from the brand encourages boys to find and celebrate their tribe, the kind of people who understand their quests and ride along too.
Pant resonated with the brand quite well! He embodies the spirit of the brand as he has the perfect mix of youthful zest, playfulness, and adventure.
Highlighting the creative journey, Ogilvy associate creative director R Parvathy said, “Tribe plays an important role in the journey of every teenager who loves cycling. It’s the tribe that shapes them and defines their rides. It decides the nature of adventures he could take on and gives him the grit to complete them. Cycling has a deep connection with brotherhood this way. These brotherhoods and tribes are what Brand Hercules aims to celebrate through the latest campaign.”
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.
