Ad Campaigns
LAVA launches its new brand campaign with Mahendra Singh Dhoni
MUMBAI: Lava International Limited, one of the leading players in the Indian mobile handset industry, launched its latest multi-channel marketing campaign featuring its brand ambassador and India’s most successful national ODI cricket team captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni. With this campaign, Lava aims to strengthen its brand identity as the most trusted and reliable mobile handset brand in the mobile handset industry. The integrated 12-week long, 360 degree marketing campaign comprises three different television commercials along with out-of-home, retail and digital marketing initiatives.
Thrilled with the launch of Lava’s new brand campaign, Lava International Limited vice president & head – Marketing & Communications Solomon Wheeler said, “We are very excited to launch this campaign with Mahendra Singh Dhoni on board as our brand ambassador. We, at Lava, believe that to build a truly endearing brand one cannot rely on just tactical differentiators; it has to be based on core values which in our case are – Integrity, passion for excellence and adaptability. Put together these values create a culture that ensures we deliver reliable products and services to our customers every time. Also, various industry reports bear testimony to our excellent product quality and after sales service which are unmatched amongst Indian mobile handset brands.”
Lava recently brought on board Soho Square, part of the WPP group, to take on Lava’s creative mandate. This is their first campaign for the brand.
On conceptualizing the campaign for Lava, Soho Square SVP & head of Advertising Dip Sengupta said, “The story of Lava is the story of reliability. It is something that is hardwired in the DNA of the organization and the great products that come out of its R&D facilities and manufacturing centers. When we delved deep into the products, we realized that the rigour and the drive for excellence that goes into each Lava phone was a story waiting to be told. The campaign with MS Dhoni was therefore a natural next step. We wanted the code of reliability to come across in an endearing manner and MS Dhoni’s interactions with the Lava representative does that effortlessly.”
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.
