Ad Campaigns
Ixigo takes a dig at cricket fans in latest campaign
MUMBAI: At a time when the entire nation has been struck by cricket fever, leading travel marketplace ixigo has come out with an all-new brand campaign that urges people to take a break from their TV screens and travel! The campaign features off-screen friend duo – Gaurav Kapur and Cyrus Sahukar, who humorously debate over their love for cricket and travel. The ad series also includes quirky lines that tie in to the campaign theme of “Koi Match Dekhega, Koi Duniya.”
Conceptualised and conceived by the Delhi office of Lowe Lintas, the idea was to use the agency’s extensive experience with e-commerce brands and startups to break away from the clutter of conventional category advertising.
Commenting on the campaign launch and agency on board, ixigo CEO and co-founder, Aloke Bajpai says, “ixigo has been at the forefront of innovation for online travel in India over the last decade. Our campaign is directed towards building wider brand awareness amongst travellers, enabling us to provide a larger customer base with the best travel planning solutions. We’re looking forward to engaging with a broader audience, who will witness wanderlust Cyrus encourage cricket-lover Gaurav to ditch the couch and plan his next trip. We are happy to be associating with Lowe Lintas and both these talented actors to launch this campaign.”
Lowe Lintas COO Naveen Gaur adds, “We’re extremely excited about the possibilities that the shared vision of ixigo and Lowe Lintas will unfold. We have used a short format film approach to inspire people to travel and showcase the seamless travel planning experience that ixigo offers.”
Launched in 2007, ixigo is India’s leading travel marketplace, with a user base of over 100 million travellers. ixigo allows you to compare and book from 120+ travel suppliers and OTAs across flights, hotels, trains, cabs and destinations.
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.
