Ad Campaigns
Parle’s 20-20 cookies new campaign gives us a ‘genuine’ reason to smile
Mumbai: Parle Products has launched its latest campaign for Parle 20-20 cookies. The brand’s past campaign thrilled us with a quirky set of situations that one has to smile through. This year, the brand has a three-film campaign that ups the ante on the same underlying theme. The cookie market in India has matured quite a bit. Parle 20-20 cookies have kept the mood light and are back to entertain us once again.
The earlier campaign had the main character smiling through the situation they are in. Whether it’s the air hostess putting on a plastic smile, or a bride going through the motions of greeting every relative with a forced smile. This campaign pushes the humour further by putting the protagonist in an unexpected situation where they have to grin and bear it.
The campaign has been created and executed by the Mumbai team of Thought Blurb Communications.
In each film, there’s a seemingly ordinary situation that turns on its head and snaps the viewer around. The last scene is nothing that the audience expects. The grin that the viewer sees is the grin of confusion or consternation, or just plain resignation. And yet, it’s a smile. The message, ‘Yunhi smile mat karo, dil se khush ho jao’ just got a fresh new makeover.
Speaking on the campaign, Parle Products vice president Mayank Shah says he is confident in the route. “We tried this new brand message last year and tested it out. The market response was positive, so we decided to put our full effort behind it. All marketing initiatives were directed towards supporting the brand message”, he said. “Still, no caution has been thrown to the wind and everybody knows that a brand message needs to grow in stages.”
Thought Blurb Communications’ national creative director Renu Somani explains the creative aspect of the project. “It was interesting looking for an alternate take on the tagline. Last year, we were trying to establish the idea and needed the films to simply explain the direction of the messaging. We now have the confidence to push the envelope outward.”
Adding to her statement, Though Blurb Communications chief creative officer Vinod Kunj asserts the importance of the team coming together. “The Parle team and our agency worked together to bring this multi-language campaign together. It was important to monitor how every market was reacting to the message. Broadcast, digital and social platforms were kept in check. We are all excited to see this campaign go further along the way in building the brand’s equity.”
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.
