Ad Campaigns
Parle Hide & Seek plays cupid for adolescent love in new campaign
Mumbai: With still some days to go for Valentine’s Day, food company major Parle Products has launched its latest advertising campaign for its chocolate chip cookie brand Hide & Seek highlighting feelings of adolescent romance.
The campaign titled ‘Start your story with Hide & Seek’ is conceptualised by Brand League Partners and seeks to establish the cookie brand’s identity as an enabler of first-time conversations and showcases how it can aid its young audience in making those first moves and getting those special conversations started. It features three distinct ad-films produced by 30 seconds of Fame and directed by Uzer Khan.
The films showcase youngsters in different scenarios- at a flower shop, on a ferry, and at a fashion show event, creating their own new language through sweet gestures wherein Hide & Seek plays their wingman/cupid. The TVC’s are tailored to connect with teenagers and young adults, who are conscious about striking a conversation with someone they like as they lack the courage to make the first move or even ask someone out for the first time, even as it demonstrates how the brand can play a catalyst in expressing affection.
“We, at Parle Products, realise how important it is for a brand to be a part of a customer’s journey. All of us have come across that time in adolescent years when the fear of rejection keeps us away from initiating conversation with that special someone,” said Parle Products senior category head Mayank Shah. “Our brand plays the role of breaking the ice so the first-time conversations between two young people are comfortable and relaxed.”
“The campaign is light-hearted and at the same time builds our brand so that we achieve top-of-mind recall among consumers and continue our brand narrative. With this TV and digital campaign, we aim to strengthen our position in the chocolate cookies category,” he added.
The Hide & Seek brand has been synonymous with ‘innocent love’ through its consistent brand communication from the past 25 years, thus making Valentine’s Day an ideal time to remind its consumers to express themselves freely since it is just around the corner, said the company.
“We wanted to create something special for consumers and we are happy to be able to create a theme for Parle’s Hide & Seek brand – ‘Start your story with Hide & Seek’, which will bring forth something relatable, fun and engaging experience for everyone,” said Brand League Partners head Samir Chonkar. “The films showcase cute and innocent interaction between couples designed to appeal to customers’ lovestruck-side and get some attention directed towards the brand.”
With the aim of celebrating the event that is immensely popular among young adults, Parle Products will focus on television advertising across genres through TVCs and digital channels. The TVCs will be released in seven languages including Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Oriya, Assamese and Tamil and will be sustained through a digital campaign.
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.
