Ad Campaigns
Kartik Aaryan lounges around in Bata’s Relaxed Workwear collection
New Delhi: After a span of one year, offices have reopened, but it is posing a major lifestyle challenge for those who have made their peace with the work from home scenario. Bata India has launched a new TVC starring Kartik Aaryan to aid people as they make the transition with the launch of its Relaxed Workwear collection.
The collection showcases four latest comfort technologies- memory comfort tech, lifesole comfort tech, contour fit, and Hush Puppies Bounce to enable people to experience home-like comfort in the office.
The TVC conceptualised by Contract Advertising features Kartik Aaryan as he listens to his roommate cribbing about having to wear formal shoes all over again. He expresses his worry about working all day long from the office in uncomfortable shoes. Kartik then proceeds to take out a comfortable pair of shoes from Bata’s Relaxed Workwear range and asks his friend to try it. The friend tries on the pair and feels surprised by the comfort of Bata shoes. As he steps out of the shoes, Kartik takes them away and cheekily asks him to visit a Bata store and get a new pair for himself.
Bata India vice-president – marketing and customer services Anand Narag said, “With offices resuming, people are staring at yet another lifestyle-altering change in a span of just one year. We wanted to contribute in making the transition easier for people, which led us to conceptualise and develop probably footwear industry’s first Relaxed Workwear range for both women and men. Through this campaign, we want consumers to come and experience our new styles across Bata Red Label, Bata Comfit, Hush Puppies and Naturalizer in our stores and from online site bata.in. The footwear range looks formal and stylish yet offers the comfort of a casual footwear and is available in season’s latest colors and designs.”
Contract India chief creative officer Sagar Mahabaleshwarkar said, “It was an interesting task where the official work wear brand wanted to redefine what work wear meant in the post pandemic times. Currently, there is a genuine need for relaxed footwear that one can easily wear to work as well. Kartik Aaryan, the new brand ambassador is an apt choice who delivers this message in his own tongue-in-cheek manner.”
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.
