Ad Campaigns
Hike Messenger’s new brand campaign reaches 200 million consumers
MUMBAI: Hike Messenger has launched its biggest ever brand campaign that will reach as many as 200 million consumers. The brand campaign rollout comes on the back of the launch of biggest ever product update, Hike 4.0, which is 5X faster and loaded with over 10 new features.
The campaign with its tag line ‘Got a Gang? Get on Hike’ aims at showcasing the ‘World of Hike’ by bringing alive groups of friends and asks consumers to create their own gang on Hike and experience the fun and spice that the product features can bring to their social conversations.
The 18 week long campaign that will run across TV, print, digital, radio and outdoor will showcase new features like sticker suggestions, free calling, group chats with over 500 people, multi-type file transfer up to 100 MB, enhanced privacy options, photo filters and doodles among others. Each product feature and its benefit will be brought alive by a different group of friends shown in different situations, with a storyline that makes the campaign fun to watch.
Hike messenger founder and CEO Kavin Bharti Mittal said, “Our goal with this campaign is to highlight those quirky groups that you cherish so much in your life and how that world would be so different, better and more expressive in so many ways in the world of Hike. This campaign truly brings out the all the great things about the latest version of Hike, which is a big step up from where we’ve been. We can’t wait for India to see it.”
Lowe Lintas president GV Krishnan added, “The all-new Hike, with its unique features, is an intelligent messenger in the world of instant messengers. Our campaign aims to bring alive the fun that these wonderful features can bring to social interactions and conversations. ‘Got a gang? Get on Hike’ is an inescapable invite from the world of Hike to join in and have fun.”
To engage with consumers in India and make messaging more relevant, along with the campaign, Hike will also be releasing special sticker packs for all major festivals in India starting with Rakhi, which falls on the 29 August. Consumers can access Rakhi sticker packs on the Hike app, which is available for android users on the Google Play store and Apple users on the iOS App store.
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.
