Ad Campaigns
Mother Dairy creams off victory in cola campaign clash
MUMBAI: As Pepsi and Coca-Cola reignite their decades-long fizzy feud ahead of the the IPL 2025 and the coming blazing summer, dairy giant Mother Dairy has quietly churned up a storm by pouring itself into the beverage battle with an utterly brilliant repartee campaign.
The latest skirmish began when Coca-Cola launched its nostalgic “Half Time, Coke Time” campaign, encouraging cricket fans to reach for the red can during match intervals. Pepsi quickly fizzed back, rebranding the Times of India as the Any Times of India with its “Anytime is Pepsi Time” response – a strategic play reminiscent of their legendary 1996 “Nothing Official About It” campaign that outflanked Coca-Cola’s official World Cup sponsorship.
Pepsi’s effervescent retort listed life’s precious moments – “first time, thirst time, play time, crunch time, winner time, we time, me time” – suggesting their blue brand transcends scheduled refreshment, sparking a social media frenzy with fans bubbling over about the clever wordplay.
Just as the carbonated competitors were locked in their temporal tussle over “half time” versus “anytime,” Mother Dairy skimmed past the conflict with a masterful third-way strategy, unveiling its “Not Just a Drink, but a Lifetime Companion” advertisement. The dairy disruptor effectively curdled both rivals’ messaging by positioning milk as the true timeless beverage.
“Coke claimed half time, Pepsi countered with anytime, but Mother Dairy has completely changed the game with lifetime,” notes a marketing analyst. “It’s like watching two soda brands argue over when you should drink them, while Mother Dairy calmly points out what you should be drinking all along.”
Industry experts suggest this calcium-rich counterpunch represents perfect timing from Mother Dairy, which has milked the opportunity to remind health-conscious consumers there’s a nutritionally superior alternative.
“This isn’t just about stealing attention; it’s about changing the conversation entirely,” explains a consumer behavior specialist. “While the cola giants debate between ‘half time’ and ‘anytime,’ Mother Dairy has moved the goalposts to ‘lifetime’—effectively highlighting that their product doesn’t just refresh momentarily but nourishes permanently.”
In this high-stakes game of marketing chess, Mother Dairy appears to have made a strategic moo-ve that has left the cola kings decidedly cheesed off and scrambling to respond to this unexpected dairy disruption in India’s competitive beverage market.
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.
