Ad Campaigns
NBA launches campaign for live primetime broadcast in India
MUMBAI: For the second consecutive season, the NBA will schedule a weekly game for live primetime broadcast in India every Sunday evening on SONY TEN 1. In conjunction with the primetime games, the NBA has launched a video campaign which highlights the differences of watching and enjoying the game in the morning and at primetime.
The film features the journey of a fan who usually starts off watching the game alone on his couch with a cup of coffee however during NBA Primetime Sundays, given the evening time band, his experience of watching the game changes where he is seen in his stylish sneakers and apparel, cheering for his teams with friends at a local bar. The video captures the joy of a fan being able to watch NBA Games at primetime along with game highlights from the season.
LINK: NBA Primetime Sunday Games
This builds on the league’s NBA Primetime Sundays campaign, a weekly live game on Sunday evenings in Africa, Europe and India. The five weekly primetime games airing from 10 March – 7 April in India will feature some of the most popular teams in the league including the L.A. Lakers, Milwaukee Bucks and Toronto Raptors.
The NBA and sports cluster of SPN will continue customised, local live NBA wraparound show ‘NBA Primetime Sunday’ before and after the prime time games to bring viewers closer to the game. The program will be hosted by a panel of basketball experts that will provide analysis and insight on all the latest NBA news. More than 120 million viewers tuned-in to NBA programming over the course of the 2017-18 NBA season and more than 3.9 million viewers tuned-in to the 2018 NBA Sunday games.
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.
