Ad Campaigns
Nescafe brews a gamer buzz with Minecraft streamers for cold coffee range
MUMBAI: Gaming and caffeine collided this April as Nestlé India took its Nescafe Ready-to-Drink Cold Coffee range to the nation’s screens via a uniquely caffeinated campaign. Tapping into India’s thriving online gaming community, Nestlé paired its café-style cold coffee with live Minecraft streams, turning digital battles into chill breaks.
The initiative kicked off as part of the expansion of Nescafe’s cold coffee lineup, aimed at the ever-scrolling, on-the-go gen z crowd. To maximise impact, Nestlé activated 27 Minecraft livestreams around the release of the game’s movie adaptation, enlisting popular streamers including GamerFleet (Anshu Bisht).
“Young India is gravitating towards gaming, and we wanted to leverage this content stream and position Nescafe’s new café style cold coffee range as the ideal partner for gaming. With this insight, we tried to build on the buzz in the Minecraft gaming community coinciding with the launch of the movie. We collaborated with some of the top game streamers through live streaming activations, with the aim of enhancing brand awareness and deepening our engagement with the youth,” said Nestlé India head, dairy business, Manav Sahni.
The campaign brewed up numbers fast. GamerFleet’s launch stream alone clocked 6.6 million impressions and 1.2 million organic views in a single weekend. In total, the campaign tallied over 3.89 million organic views across 10 days.
Streamo founder Tushaar Garg added, “Minecraft isn’t just a game-it’s a cultural phenomenon brewing for over 15 years on YouTube and has shaped digital communities, fuelled creativity, and provided a space for millions to hang out. Streamo is pleased to have aggregated, automated and activated the Minecraft community on YouTube for Nescafe’s new Cold Coffee range – keeping gamers refreshed over long hours of streaming.”
The campaign was brought to life through a collaboration between Nestlé India, media agency Publicis, and Streamo, an ad-tech platform that connects brands with a creator network of over 20,000 gaming influencers. And the stream hasn’t dried up yet-an extended activation involving 50 streamers is set to unfold through April, brewing further excitement for the chilled coffee range.
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.
