Ad Campaigns
How 11 Wickets got puppet Pappinder Singh playing fantasy cricket
Mumbai : Pappinder Singh is a witty man. Pappinder Singh knows the difference between the smart and the naive. Also, Pappinder Singh is a puppet, but as humanlike as any one of us and he is now the face of 11 wickets, an online fantasy cricket league.
11 Wickets has released a series of films to create awareness around its offerings. Along with the humanlike puppet, the campaign also features his roommate, a simple guy who takes everything Pappinder says on its face value without understanding it completely. This hilarious banter between the guy’s fascination for a particular food and Pappinder’s animated outburst at this guy’s simpleton arguments draws across an analogy between the unique features of 11 Wickets, creating memorable stories.
Conceptualised and executed by Shreyansh Innovations, one of Kolkata’s leading creative ad agency, the campaign has three films which are live across TV and all digital channels, including social media and OTT.
Ability Games managing director Suraj Chokhani commented on the campaign, “When the agency came up with this thought of onboarding Pappinder Singh for the campaign, we instantly liked it, because it was very fresh in the advertising domain as a whole. We believe this approach will get a lot of people talking about our brand and also our brand ambassador.”
Shreyansh Innovations founder Shreyansh Baid says, “Today advertising is dominated with the excessive use of celebrities, and the same goes when it comes to promoting fantasy league platforms as well. We wanted to move away from this clutter and have a brand ambassador on board that people will truly relate to and remember for a long time.”
Adding to it, chief creative officer Debdarsan Dutta and creative director Vaishakh Jhunjhunwala from Shreyansh Innovations said, “Fantasy gaming is becoming a very huge domain with millions of players getting added every day. But what isn’t happening is the way these apps promote themselves. All of them look and sound the same when it comes to their offerings. That’s the barrier we wanted to break with a clutter-cutting campaign that doesn’t just talk about its unique features in an interesting way but also creates a high recall value for the consumers. We hope Pappinder Singh and his flatmate are able to do exactly that.”
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.
