Ad Campaigns
Manika Batra joins adidas’ athlete roster with ‘Impossible Is Nothing’ campaign
Mumbai: Sportswear giant adidas has brought table tennis player Manika Batra on board as a part of its initiative to celebrate and boost women in the world of sports. The duo aims to drive credibility and inclusivity in sports, further fanning the aspirations of upcoming women sportspersons across the country, stated the brand.
Manika joins adidas’ rich roster of women athletes, consisting of stellar names like Mirabai Chanu, Lovlina Borgohain, Hima Das, Nikhat Zareen, to name a few.
This partnership focuses on empowering women to realise their dreams as the brand continues to be an ally for women breaking barriers and creating a reverberating impact in the world of sports. The brand partners with Manika Batra, an Arjuna Awardee in 2018 and Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna winner in 2020, and many more.
On this new association with adidas, Manika Batra said, “Partnering with adidas is an opportunity every sportsperson looks forward to. I am very excited and grateful for this to have come my way especially at a time when the brand is celebrating women through their ‘Impossible Is Nothing’ campaign. I hope with my sport and my association with adidas, I can empower and encourage women to see possibilities irrespective of the challenges so that the nation can witness many more ‘golden girls’.
Speaking about the collaboration, brand adidas India senior director Sunil Gupta said, “We are thrilled to have Manika Batra as the newest member of the adidas family. She is an inspiration to many young women who aspire to push limits and achieve seemingly unachievable goals. We will continue to drive the attitude, “Impossible Is Nothing” through our athletes while celebrating women in the world of sports”
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.
