Ad Campaigns
OYO swings into cricket season with 6000 free stays and fun ad campaign
Mumbai: Cricket season is upon us, and global travel technology company OYO is adding to the excitement with an exclusive offer for fans– 6,000 free stays across its premium properties like SUNDAY Hotels, Palette Hotels, and OYO Townhouses across India.
OYO’s Free Stays League campaign invites cricket fans to participate in a daily prediction challenge. Participants who correctly predict the winner of each match in the ongoing T20 tournament will be entered into a daily draw. Every day, 100 individuals will be rewarded with a free stay at a premium OYO property of their choice, along with Amazon vouchers worth up to Rs 5,000. Every correct prediction will get OYO Rupee worth Rs 100 that can be used towards their next booking with OYO. The participant with the most accurate predictions throughout the tournament will win the grand prize – an iPhone 15.
As a part of this campaign, OYO has launched a new ad film which playfully addresses those who might try to leverage personal connections for a free stay. The lighthearted ad features characters boasting about their (fictitious) connections with OYO founder and CEO Ritesh Agarwal. In one scene, a character claims their father convinced Ritesh to join the popular TV show Shark Tank as a judge, while another hilariously fabricates a childhood friendship, saying they used to play cricket together as kids. The ad concludes by highlighting that only one’s cricket prediction skills, not their network, will unlock these incredible free stays during the T20 tournament.
“Cricket holds a special place in the hearts of millions of Indians. As the nation celebrates another exciting cricket season, we wanted to offer a little treat to all the cricket enthusiasts out there and share the joy of the game. Our special offer not only adds excitement to the cricket matches but also underscores our commitment to providing unique experiences for our guests.” said OYO founder and group CEO Ritesh Agarwal.
“Creating something special during one the world’s most watched cricket leagues can be a little tricky as all the brands out there want to capitalize on this and capture the audience’s attention. With Free Stays League, we knew we wanted to take it away from the typical cricket ad and make it about regular people. The insight that people never truly say that they got something for free, but rather brag about getting it in different ways, hit home for us. Following Shark Tank, there has been a huge buzz around Ritesh Agarwal’s name, and we knew we had to leverage this. We are thrilled that team OYO shared our vision and supported us throughout.” said Blank The Agency founder & CEO Nikhil Chaudhary.
As OYO continues to redefine hospitality experiences in India, this cricket season offer reaffirms company’s dedication to creating memorable moments for its guests.
To join the contest, download the OYO app, click on the Free Stays tab, and predict the winner of the cricket match.
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.
