Ad Campaigns
Lay’s unveils a series of TVCs for its ‘smile deke dekho campaign’
MUMBAI: LAY’S, India’s favorite potato chip brand, today launched their latest series of TVCs for the all new ‘Smile Deke Dekho’ campaign featuring India’s leading Bollywood actors and youth icons Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt. With this new campaign, LAY’S brings alive the idea of how a Smile comes in a variety of flavors and goes beyond the conventional boundaries and barriers to establish connections portraying various moods and emotions. The TVCs capture how ‘Smile’ is a universal language and sharing a pack of LAY’S chips with a smile can help build connections effortlessly.
LAY’S has always been the perfect companion for every celebration and good times with friends. For over two decades, LAY’S has been on a mission to bring more smiles to the consumers across the country. To further this proposition, the brand has brought its global Smile campaign to India as ‘LAY’S Smile Deke Dekho’ campaign. Launched for a limited time period, the new LAY’S packaging features six different smiles that capture different moods and emotions through its various flavors.
Expressing his thoughts on the campaign, Mr. Dilen Gandhi, Sr Director, Marketing – Foods Category, PepsiCo India, said, “LAY’S Smile Deke Dekho is based on a simple premise that just like a smile, a pack of LAY’S can build connections between people. And when you combine a smile and LAY’S the results are magical. To tell these stories we have brought together two of India’s best actors – Alia and Ranbir – for the first time on screen together for a series of stories told by one of India’s foremost filmmakers – Dibakar Banerjee. These stories are just the latest chapter in the brand’s two-decade history of building connections. And judging by the response we are getting on social media, one of our best yet.”
As a brand, LAY’S has always closely resonated with the youth of the country and has been a part of all their fun and special moments. With travel being their topmost passion points, the new LAY’S TVCs also portray how LAY’S is a constant travel-partner for consumers in India.
Speaking about the TVC, Mr. Senthil Kumar, Chief Creative Officer, Wunderman Thompson India, said, “In this emoticon crazy world, we wanted to give actual emoting a chance. Our device – the most beautiful emotion ever – a smile. We asked the country to try sharing theirs and that resulted to #SmileDekeDekho. The journey started with packaging design – giving each flavor the smile that went best with it. Then we went live with spots featuring Bollywood heartthrobs Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor – casting them in TVCs as strangers, acquaintances and as a couple – where they taught the country how to use the packs. Slotted for right after – we’re going live on mobile screens across the country – giving those hooked to it, reason enough to look up, and share a smile with the lovely people around them. Just how? You’ll know when it happens, keep watching the series of TVCs on the campaign.”
Directed by Dibakar Banerjee, the new TVC captures an interesting conversation between Alia and Ranbir as they embark upon a journey on a train. When Alia asks Ranbir to share, he abruptly refuses thinking she is talking about his pack of LAY’S. Alia then clarifies that she was talking about the seat and taunts Ranbir, as a response to which he quips about having a charming smile. The TVC ends with the trail of the song ‘Smile Deke Dekho’.
The first look of the campaign was revealed earlier last week through a teaser on social media on the occasion of World Smile Day, wherein brand ambassadors, Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt, were seen exchanging smiles using LAY’S packs.
As a part of the larger campaign for ‘Smile Deke Dekho’ the brand also connected with leading influencers across social media to drive awareness for the new packaging. The smiles of all influencers were mapped and were then matched to our various flavor variants. The brand produced personalized packs of LAY’S, featuring the smiles of influencers that were sent out to them, creating a money-can’t-buy delightful moment for them. The campaign drove huge engagement across platforms generating over 70 million impressions.
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.
