Ad Campaigns
Mullen Lowe Lintas Group bags Grand Prix at Warc for Idea
MUMBAI: Idea’s Cellular’s ‘No Ullu Banoing’ ad campaign by Mullen Lowe Lintas Group has won the $5,000 Grand Prix at the WARC Prizefor Asian Strategy awards.
All of its three shortlisted entries won multiple laurels at the awards leading the India and South Asian leg.
‘Idea Cellular: The fool-proof internet service’ won a Grand Prix, a Gold and also picked up a cash prize of $5000, making it a second year in a row.
Of the other two shortlists, ‘Havells: A woman is not a home appliance’ won silver and Local Hero Special Award cash prize of $1000 while ‘Tata Tea: From packaged good to packaging good’ won a bronze award at the event.
Lowe Lintas national planning director S Subramanyeswar said, “It is amazing to see our work being appreciated on a world renowned stage like WARC. This consistent recognition amplifies and glorifies our belief in creating authentic and relevant work that works in the marketplace. We carried on from our excellent standing last year where we won both the Grand Prix and also the first Special Prize ever. We thank the jury for bestowing this honour once again on us. We hope to keep raising the bar.”
The Warc Prize for Asian Strategy is the annual competition to find the region’s best strategic case studies. Into its fifth year, the free-to-enter Prize is Asia’s leading showcase for incisive strategic thinking in marketing, with a $10,000 prize fund for winning papers. The 2015 edition of the awards event was held in Mumbai on 29 October, 2015 and attended by prominent advertising and marketing professionals.
This year, a total of 39 entries were shortlisted with more than half of these coming from India. With 21 case studies, entries from India made up for a chunk of the total while China/Hong Kong and Singapore each contributed four entries and the Philippines three. Overall, the award platform received more than 130 entries from across the Asia Pacific region and the shortlists came from eight markets and from a mix of major networks and local independent agencies.
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.
