Ad Campaigns
MS Dhoni returns as Bijness Bhai to empower small businesses in India
NEW DELHI: Web hosting company GoDaddy has launched a new integrated marketing campaign encouraging small local businesses in the country to create an online presence for their business. Aligned with the government’s ‘Vocal for Local’ mission, through this campaign GoDaddy aims to support local businesses in India by helping them build their own website easily.
Conceptualised by Tilt Brand Solutions, the television commercial sees MS Dhoni, GoDaddy’s India brand ambassador, make a comeback as Bijness Bhai to encourage small local businesses to ‘make in India and sell in full India’ by building a website with GoDaddy’s online tools and solutions.
The campaign will be available in seven Indian languages, including Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. This will help spread the message to Indian small business owners and entrepreneurs across multiple geographies in the country.
Dhoni said, “As an aspiring and home-grown entrepreneur myself, I understand how important it is now, more than ever, to have an online presence for your business. Many local small businesses have struggled to survive and grow amidst these difficult times due to lack of digital existence. In this challenging pitch of business, one needs to have the right online tools and solutions to deliver a match-winning performance.”
GoDaddy India MD & vice president Nikhil Arora said, “We are thrilled to have MS Dhoni on board, yet again, for phase 3 of our famous Bijness Bhai marketing campaign. He represents a trusted voice of India with a successful professional journey, as a cricketer and as an Indian entrepreneur. With a strong connection to his local roots; he is the perfect influence for Indian small businesses to dream big. By working with Dhoni, we aim to continue to inspire all local businesses in the country to grow their business with an online presence.”
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.
