Ad Campaigns
Hyundai i20 viral campaign ‘Casts a Spell’ crosses over one million viewers
NEW DELHI: A unique viral campaign ‘Hyundai i20 Casts a Spell’ launched by Hyundai Motor India to promote the i-Gen i20 garnered over one million views on YouTube and other digital platforms within a span of three weeks.
The campaign is an initiative to expand its outreach through digital medium. Targeting the youth, HMIL has undertaken a slew of initiatives to engage its customers and bolster the appeal of the brand.
The ‘Cast a Spell’ digital film uses a generous sprinkle of humour to highlight the car and its innovative features. The viral campaign creatively highlights the hatchback’s latest features including its automatic headlamps, rain sensing wipers and rear view camera with parking sensor.
Unbridled by the constraints of a television commercial with limited time frame of 20 to 30 seconds, the video has been successful to engage its viewers, all in a short span.
On the i20 viral video, Hyundai Motor India senior GM and group head Nalin Kapoor said, “The audience of digital media is innovative and experimental in their reception to brand communication. The viral video for the i20 was conceptualised to reach the youth on the internet in an engaging format. The i20 viral campaign was developed to create a buzz on the digital media, involve and engage consumers using humor and at the same time communicating class leading features of the i20.”
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.
