Ad Campaigns
Neeraj Chopra dons new avatar in Cred’s latest ad
Mumbai: Credit card bill payment platform Cred has unveiled the first ad of its IPL 2021 campaign featuring India’s Olympic hero Neeraj Chopra. The latest edition of the sports extravaganza resumed on Sunday.
After the viral campaign with Rahul Dravid earlier this year, this new ad highlights Cred’s features and rewards system. In this new ad, the 23-year-old javelin gold medalist from Tokyo Olympics can be seen donning the hat of a reporter, a producer among others.
The campaign was conceptualised by Tanmay Bhat, Devaiah Bopanna, Puneet Chadha, Deep Joshi, and Vishal Dayama and written by EarlyMan Film. Karan Malhotra lent his expertise to compose the music for the films. “With IPL coming back, we are excited to collaborate with India’s favorite heroes and make them do quirky things for Cred,” said EarlyMan Film director and co-founder Ayappa.
“We are happy to continue our partnership with IPL as it returns this year,” said Cred founder and CEO Kunal Shah. “At Cred, our vision is to build a trustworthy community. In this campaign, we aim to solidify our message of financial literacy and educate the viewers on the benefits of practicing responsible financial behaviour,” he added.
“I am very happy to be associated with Cred, which aims at building a community of disciplined, trustworthy, and creditworthy people,” said Chopra. “Playing the part in this ad-film was a totally different and entertaining experience and I hope the audiences enjoy this side of me!”
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.
