Ad Campaigns
Meta AI taps desi curiosity with DDB Mudra’s ‘Aaj kya karoge?’ nudge
MUMBAI: Not your average tech launch, Meta’s new AI tool just dropped in India with a desi twist, thanks to DDB Mudra’s latest campaign that turns into a lazy-day question—’Aaj kya karoge?‘—into a call to dream bigger.
Meta AI, now seamlessly baked into WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, is being pitched not as a cold, complex tool but as a warm, witty sidekick that helps elevate the everyday. The campaign tackles a key perception problem head-on: that AI is all brains, no soul.
Enter six short films, each telling a hyper-local, delightfully ordinary story—from different cities and age groups—that flips the mundane into the magical with a little help from Meta AI. From unlocking creative hobbies to simply streamlining chaos, the message is clear: this isn’t AI for coders, it’s for chai-sippers and chat-typers alike.
The blitz didn’t stop at screens. Contextual billboards in Delhi and Lucknow spoke in local dialects, while YouTube ads served up prompts mid-search, making the experience feel uncannily personal. Throw in a dozen influencers across cities, each giving Meta AI their own local flavour, and the result is a campaign that doesn’t feel like a launch—it feels like life.
DDB Mudra creative director Mahima Mathur, talking about the creative process and the approach to the campaign, said, “We didn’t want to introduce Meta AI with the usual fanfare. We wanted India to find it in its own way – in places we already live and love. In a WhatsApp chat. While scrolling through Facebook. In an Instagram group. ‘Aaj kya karoge?’ isn’t just a line. It’s a friendly nudge. An invitation to think a little bigger, try something new, and let Meta AI make it all a little easier, one day at a time.”
With this effort, Meta positions its AI not as an upgrade—but as an invitation. One that turns routine into play, and every scroll into possibility.
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.
