Ad Campaigns
McDonald’s launches quirky TVCs
MUMBAI: Hardcastle Restaurants Pvt Ltd, the master franchisee of McDonald’s in West and South India, has launched three new TVCs to promote its ‘Thank God It’s Fry-Day!’ proposition. The restaurant is offering the customers free fries with its medium McSaver meal.
The three TVCs, which have been conceptualised by DDB Mudra, reinforce the company’s brand promise of ‘easy to feel good’ and capture the customers’ absolute delight on getting free fries in a fun and quirky way. With this, the brand is all set to make its customers say ’i’m lovin’ it’ over and over again.
This is an integrated campaign which will be aired across TV, digital and social platforms.
Sharing his views on this campaign, Hardcastle Restaurants director – marketing and communications Arvind RP said, “At McDonald’s, we believe in offering our customers unparalleled value. Value for today’s customer is a combination of price, experience and variety and that is the key insight behind this campaign. We want to delight our customers and offer them wholesome and nutritious meal options, complete with our iconic fries. Our strategy is to drive value for our customers through our McSavers platform and position McDonald’s as a meal destination for all consumer groups.”
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.
