Ad Campaigns
Musafir.com set to ‘ghoomao’ Indians along with Sachin
Mumbai: Sachin Tendulkar may be all set to hang his boots, but there’s no dearth of opportunities for him. Now, the master blaster is on-board with Musafir.com – a new travel portal that has just made an entry in the Indian market. The cricketer has a 7.5 per cent stake in the company.
Founded in the UAE by Sachin Gadoya, Albert Dias and Mohammed Al Thani in August 2007, the site has roped in Sachin Tendulkar as its face. The portal chose the cricketer for the fact that he is a champion and a global citizen.
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We understand the travel market well, says Manu Monga
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“One doesn’t associate Sachin to a particular state or a region but to India. He is a global citizen and a champion and that’s what we want to establish here.” says Musafir’s marketing vice president & head Manu Monga empahsing that they have enough experience about the sector and despite of being new in India, they are not scared of the already established names in the market. “We understand the travel market well,” says Musafir’s marketing vice president & head Manu Monga empahsing that they have enough experience about the sector.
The UAE based travel portal launched in the country recently wants to be seen on the top of the hospitality sector. Universal Travels, which is the parent company of the portal, has been around for a long time in the middle-East and believes that the travel industry has boomed in India in the last seven years. “We don’t think any market can mature in such a short period of time and there is more than enough space for growth,” says Monga.
The USP of the portal will be its ability to help people plan their holidays. It wants to be known for complete travel solutions provided to the Indian travellers with exceptional customer service and several product innovations.
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The site has already allotted its various duties – Publicis will handle creative duties, while Maxus will be in charge of the media planning and buying.
The company has spent around Rs 20-25 crore during its launch period. In the first leg of their promotion, Musafir.com has branded all the charging points at all major airports in the country. Apart from this, Tendulkar will be seen showing the travellers “a new way to go ghoomne” wherein Musafir.com is a new enabler encouraging “people to stop dreaming and start travelling”.
It plans to have a 360 degree marketing campaign that includes radio, television and outdoor media and will soon be launching a second phase of marketing campaign with festival and holiday season approaching.
The company plans to invest Rs 100 crore in the first year of its launch. By 2018, it aspires to be among the top five OTAs (Online Travel Agent) in India leveraging on its strong investment capability and expertise in the travel sector.
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.
