Ad Campaigns
Infectious Advertising onboards Subhash Kamath as leadership mentor
Mumbai: Infectious Advertising has roped in Subhash Kamath as its leadership mentor. Kamath is an advertising veteran just shy of 40 years of hands-on experience. In this time he has worked with Ogilvy, Grey, Ambience Publicis, Bates and BBH.
For the last quarter of a century, Kamath has been in top leadership roles, seventeen of which have been as a CEO. He has successfully led three mergers and acquisitions for WPP, and founded and built organisations like BBH in India from scratch. Over the years, he has provided strategic leadership to a lot of top brands – for both Indian and multinational clients. He believes strongly in driving leadership, as opposed to mere management.
Kamath believes that people are the only real assets of a business. He has always been a people’s person – nurturing and inspiring his team. Now he wants to do what he loves full time – ‘Mentoring Brands & Mentoring People’.
“We at Infectious are delighted to have him on board as a mentor. We look forward to his invaluable wisdom and experience to groom the Leadership team for the next growth burst. He also will have several interactive storytelling sessions to instil in our young talent the vision and rigour to excel,” said Infectious Advertising founders Nisha Singhania & Ramanuj Shastry.
“Subhash has been a friend, philosopher and guide for both of us for a long time. When he mentioned that he was getting into mentoring we put our hands up immediately. His wisdom and insights will be invaluable to us as we prepare to launch into our next phase of growth. We are delighted that he has kindly agreed,” concluded Singhania and Shastry.
“Throughout my career, I’ve been blessed with great mentors, who helped better me with their wisdom and experience. I wish to follow in their footsteps and do my bit for the next generation of leaders. I’ve known Nisha and Ramanuj for many years now and they’ve built a fine agency. So when they reached out to me, I instantly agreed to mentor them,” said Kamath.
Kamath has an industry-wide network because of his involvement with Goafest for The Advertising Club and has been on the ASCI board for the past 13 years, serving as its chairman between 2020-2022. Apart from his work, Kamath is a celebrated musician and an accomplished chef. He even has his own rock & blues band ‘Wanted Yesterday’. His pet phrase is from a Bob Dylan song, “He not busy being born, is busy dying”.
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.
