Ad Campaigns
Mappls KOGO brings a disruptive campaign with #unboxtheplanet
Mumbai: Mappls KOGO, a start-up aiming to build the world’s largest community powered travel and experiences platform, has announced a new brand campaign called #unboxtheplanet. The brand has released teaser videos and images on social media with a Spaceman aptly named “the Kogonaut”, as the hero character coming back to planet earth to rediscover it as never seen before.
The Kogonaut, an eclectic explorer in a spacesuit, will be an integral part of KOGO’s upcoming communication and messaging across platforms and will be used to create a distinctive ‘cultural identity’ for the community. The campaign is predominantly a digital campaign running across their social media handles with innovative hyper-personalized, passion-centric videos delivered to the audiences.
The Kogonaut is seen roaming the streets and exploring different experiences across earth’s busiest and most scenic landscapes. With the #unboxtheplanet campaign, KOGO hopes to inspire and enable people to explore the world by making travel and experiences more relevant and discoverable. During the campaign, the Kogonaut will collaborate with the travel community, set major travel goals, recommend experiences and show people how they can unbox the planet, one great experience at a time.
Speaking on this, Mappls KOGO co-founder & CEO Raj K Gopalakrishnan said, “Every story needs a device. And what better device to use for a story about travel and discovery than a travel influencer in a space suit, looking at this planet with eyes of wonder? Since inception, our vision is to bring a travel tribe and inspire and enable them to discover new places and experiences in an engaging and gamified format.”
Mappls KOGO is a community-powered travel platform that runs on a new-gen currency called KOGOCOIN, which can be used to book and buy experiences, itineraries, hotels, and cool merch at the best prices. Users can supercharge their savings by getting the KOGO X membership, which enables them to earn and spend three times more KOGOCOIN than a regular user.
Mappls KOGO CPO & co-founder Praveer Kochhar added, “Every essence of KOGO has been designed to unbox excitement, exhilaration, inspiration, happiness, and fun for our community of users. The Kogonaut is everyone who’s here, unboxing the planet in their own way.”
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.
