Ad Campaigns
Liquor Ticker World’s first ad ticker on WhatsApp
MUMBAI Cafe TC and the digital agency from the Dentsu Aegis Network – Dentsu Webchutney have created Liquor Ticker, claiming it to be the world’s first ad ticker on the popular messenger WhatsApp.
Cafe TC, earlier known as Turquoise Cottage, was on the lookout for a low-budget campaign to promote its makeover to target mainly its patrons. Executed by Dentsu Webchutney Innovation Lab, Liquor Ticker converted Cafe TC’s status into a running ticker and the profile pics into ever-changing Graphics Interchange Formats (GIFs) to show a vast variety of content – from its brand new logo to the new menu and a host of offers. Users could send a screenshot of an offer they liked to avail of it at the bar.
“Our brief was clear to the agency. Promote our revamp in a way never done before, but of course, with a limited budget!” revealed Cafe TC founder Gaurab Soral. He added, “When the agency told me that they planned to use WhatsApp, I was a little sceptical since WhatsApp doesn’t offer any official ad space! And we’re not the kind of brand that would spam its users.”
Dentsu Webchutney Innovation Lab CCT Gurbaksh Singh said, “We were toying with this idea for quite some time now, but were looking for that perfect match. With a little play of technology, read that as modifying WhatsApp’s API (Application Program Interface), we created an ad space on a medium that doesn’t have any! Liquor Ticker might just open the floodgates of advertising on WhatsApp.”
Last year, Cafe TC along with Dentsu Webchutney came up with the award-winning Happy Hours Rewind where users could turn back time and extend the happy hours by tweeting more and more.
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.
