Ad Campaigns
Knorr & Netflix set off a dare-to-slurp-ramen-noodles craze ahead of the Squid Game 2 launch
MUMBAI: Fans of the hit Korean global hit Squid Game and of Korean cuisine have a double delight coming their way. Not only will they get to the watch its second season when it hits Netflix on 26 December they will also get to slurp up their Korean noodles while watching the show.
Food major Knorr – part of Hindustan Unilever- has partnered with Netflix to launch a special edition Korean ramen range inspired by the show. This includes Squid Game-themed packs in three flavors: Jjajangmyeon, Spicy Kimchi, and Gochujang Chicken.
A 90-second film has been launched featuring masked guards and a front man challenging a group of young participants to finish a bowl of spicy Korean ramen in 60 seconds. If they fail, the frontman warns, they will be eliminated. The participants dig into their bowls and slurp away to their soul’s delight, but they also find it spicy. The red light-green light doll, Young-hee, makes a cameo and looks around. As the seconds tick down, one of them drops down a trap door as he has been tardy in his eating. The others hurry to finish their bowls. As the stop clock stops, those who don’t finish, drop down trapdoors.
And the front man removes his mask to reveal himself to be Gulshan Grover mouthing his famous dialogue: “Front man. Nooo baaaad maaan.”
Throughout the film, the background music and chants are inspired from the Squid Games series, making for an eerie and thrilling film. It ends with a voice over challenging audiences watching the film to dare to enter the dare to slurp challenge.
Consumers can do so by picking up a special Knorr Squid Game pack which features designs from the series and includes a QR code for the Dare-to-Slurp game, offering them a chance to win a trip to Seoul and attend a Squid Game fan event.
The film – which also has a 40 second version – is being blasted across YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and heard on Spotify. On YouTube, it had generated 10 million views in just nine days.
An extensive out of home advertising campaign has been planned.
As of the night of 19 December, key opinion leaders (read influencers) had been posting videos about them taking part in the challenge. Knorr’s digital campaign features 45 of them including Orry, Urfi, Falguni Pathak, and Yashraj Mukhate, taking on the Dare to Slurp challenge. Underground rappers Big Deal, Yungsta, Yoki, and Seige are also creating exclusive raps for the campaign.
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.
