Ad Campaigns
Imagine by Ample gamifies iphone 17 pre-bookings with ‘Imagine More’
MUMBAI: Booking a phone just got an upgrade. Imagine by Ample has shaken up India’s premium retail market with its “Imagine More” campaign: a gamified, consumer-first approach to iphone 17 pre-bookings that promises more than just a transaction.
Conceptualised by creative agency Schbang, the campaign cuts through the usual clutter of offers and queues by focusing on “more offers, more rewards, more experiences.” At the heart of the innovation lies the ‘More Portal’: a seven-day gamified Whatsapp journey that keeps customers engaged from pre-booking to delivery, with surprises, rewards, and interactive touchpoints along the way.
Ample Group, chief marketing officer, Neha Jindal explained, “With the iphone 17, we’ve gone beyond convenience to create a first-of-its-kind platform that makes the journey fun, engaging, and rewarding. At Imagine, Apple fans don’t just upgrade, they celebrate.”
Backed by 36 micro-influencers, eight city-specific PR rollouts, and regional storytelling in Tamil, Malayalam, and Bangalore-centric activations, the campaign ensures Apple enthusiasts across India feel both excited and included.
“This launch was never about just enabling pre-bookings,” said Schbang’s Vrinda Bajaj. “It was about crafting an experience that built anticipation at every step, so Apple fans felt celebrated, not just serviced.”
With 47 stores across south India and a strong digital footprint, Imagine by Ample has already cemented itself as one of India’s leading Apple-exclusive retailers. By transforming a routine pre-order process into an immersive, gamified journey, it has now raised the bar for how brands can create loyalty and excitement in a crowded market.
In short, Imagine isn’t just selling iphones, it’s selling the thrill of the wait.
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.
