Ad Campaigns
HMD debuts in India with its first campaign
Mumbai: HMD which stands for human mobile devices launched their first-ever brand campaign in collaboration with AndAnd Brand Partners in India, featuring Sanya Malhotra and Jimmy Shergill introducing their inaugural product lineup, the HMD Crest smartphone and the feature phones HMD 105 and 110, respectively. The digital and TVC campaign marks a significant step in establishing the brand in one of the world’s most competitive markets.
“Successfully launching our first products, the HMD Crest 5G smartphones along with the feature phones HMD 105 and HMD 110, marks our intent to dig deep for the long haul in the competitive Indian market,” said HMD India CMO & online sales head Tathagat Jena. “We are a young-at-heart, style-forward, lifestyle brand, which hopes to connect with the trendy young consumers of India by breaking the mould of ‘over-the-top tech talk and let consumers enjoy our brand speak at all times.”
The smart devices, featuring best-in-class 50MP gesture selfies with the new HMD Crest series smartphones and equally feature-packed HMD 105 and HMD 110 models, highlight the brand’s commitment to addressing the real needs of Indian consumers through meaningful, user-friendly technology.
The agency handling HMD’s mandate, AndAnd Brand Partners’ Rajesh Minocha added, “To bring a brand to life is way bigger than bring a script to screen. The task cut out for us was to create a great first impression for brand HMD. It comes in with its own values in an industry that is immensely cluttered. The campaigns and launches reflect how the brand enhances human capabilities through tech, without becoming overwhelming. So, it is not one campaign on a specific product line, what we have put together is an entire eco-system of creative assets for a new brand.”
Sanya Malhotra has recently been appointed as the brand ambassador with HMD India for its entire smartphone range, starting with the HMD Crest series, which elevates and humanises the selfie experience with AI-enabled gesture control technology. The video campaign features Sanya taking selfies while showing off her breezy dance steps with easy gestures on the HMD Crest, highlighting one of the core features that allow users to capture hands-free selfies, enhancing their usability and creativity.
In a parallel world, Jimmy Shergill plays Jimmy Bhaiya to his butler Manohar in a humorous campaign bringing to life the easy-to-use feature phones, which include essential and user-friendly innovations like the “Phone Talker” feature and ever-increasing-use-case, digital payments enabled by UPI both by SMS and scan & pay. These designs enhance daily interactions and financial transactions, making the phones incredibly user-friendly and relevant to India’s evolving digital-first audience.
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.
