Ad Campaigns
MSD ditches Schbang over irresponsible Poonam Pandey death stunt
Mumbai: MSD, the Indian arm of the American pharmaceutical company Merck, has ended its collaboration with the digital marketing firm Schbang due to its involvement in a controversial publicity stunt featuring actor and model Poonam Pandey.
Merck manufactures the Gardasil vaccine, which guards against HPV strains linked to cervical cancer. This decision was prompted by the emergence of news regarding the publicity campaign. Certain social media posts implied MSD’s connection to the stunt.
As per a report in the Economic Times, an MSD spokesperson stated that the partnership was terminated due to conflicts of interest.
On February 6, venture capitalist Mahesh Murthy connected Schbang to Poonam Pandey and MSD’s HPV vaccine in a LinkedIn post. He shared a link indicating that the awareness campaign had garnered over 43 million YouTube views and had been shared by several influencers.
Gardasil has been on the market in India since 2008. Gardasil 9, which targets nine HPV strains, is priced at Rs 10,850 per dose, while the quadrivalent Gardasil is priced at Rs 4,000 per dose.
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.
