Ad Campaigns
Macho Sporto launches ‘Yeh Toh Bada Toing Hai 2.0’ TVC
Mumbai: Amul Macho turned gender stereotypes on its head way back in 2007 when the brand launched the daring “Yeh Toh Bada Toing Hai” TVC for Amul Macho underwear by focusing on female desire. With the jingle achieving cult status, the brand is back over a decade later with the launch of Macho Sporto and a new campaign along similar lines.
Conceptualised by creative agency Leo Burnett and promoted by media agency Madison Media Omega, the Macho Sporto campaign films consist of three films featuring actors Rashmika Mandanna and Vicky Kaushal.
The film portrays Mandanna playing a yoga instructor and Vicky Kaushal as one of her students, depicting different humorous scenarios during their yoga sessions. The brand attempts to playfully legitimise the female gaze.
“Through this campaign, we wanted to address and break regressive old-fashioned gender stereotypes,” said Leo Burnett CEO and chief creative officer for South Asia Rajdeepak Das. “Typically innerwear brands portray conventional male-dominant imagery, but our films depict a role reversal where we normalise and make the woman in control. This is probably the first time where a men’s wear brand is showing a woman taking the lead.”
“We are reviving our iconic campaign ‘Yeh Toh Bada Toing Hai’ with a modern and trendier avatar of Macho Sporto. Although we are advertising men’s underwear, the campaign is centred around a young and confident woman who is empowered enough to gaze at a man she feels attracted to,” said JG Hosiery (parent company of Macho Sporto) MD Navinn Seksaria. “Breaking patriarchal stereotypes, the campaign intends to highlight how today’s women don’t hesitate in making the first move.”
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.
