Ad Campaigns
Paytm launches Rs 50 crore marketing campaign for IPL
MUMBAI: Paytm has launched its new brand campaign on the Indian Premier League (IPL). Through this brand film, it aims to reinforce its position as the leader in the mobile commerce space. The outlay for this marketing campaign is in the range of Rs 50 crores, where Paytm is an associate sponsor on Sony and is also the official partner of Mumbai Indians.
The campaign is led by TV and the thematic film tries to establish Paytm as the simpler, more convenient solution to a significant number of slice of life, everyday situations. It weaves together an interesting narrative of the broad range of services such as mobile wallet, mobile and DTH recharges, money transfer and online shopping that Paytm provides. The campaign will be amplified through radio, outdoor and other media vehicles.
McCann is the creative agency on the account, and the TVCs are directed by Pushpinder Singh. Flying Saucer is the production house.
McCann was recently appointed as the Agency on Record (AoR) for Paytm and will be handling the creative account for Paytm going forward.
The montage ad begins with a rakhi scene in which a brother surprises his sister by transferring money in her Paytm wallet after the ritual. Next comes the scene where a husband is in the middle of preparing a dish for his wife by taking tips from a TV show, when suddenly the show stops as the DTH recharge gets over. This is when his wife activates the recharge through Paytm and the cooking continues. The ad moves on to showing a homesick son, going to the war front and how he brings a smile on his mother’s face by sending her a mobile recharge through Paytm, making sure distance doesn’t separate them. The ad then shows how a passenger transfers money into the Paytm wallet of his taxi driver as he doesn’t have change, showing the convenience of money transfer in a last minute situation. Lastly, the TVC ends with a lady bargaining while shopping online and making the purchase at the price of her choice, which again is another crucial feature that Paytm offers.
Paytm SVP Shankar Nath said, “The one minute long commercial knits together the multiple services (mobile wallet, mobile and dth recharges, money transfer and online shopping) that we provide to make life simpler, easier and hurdle-free for our customers. The TVC dovetails perfectly with our objective of making everyday life simpler for a vast majority of Indians. We have attempted to illustrate our solutions through a warm, slightly emotional narrative and are confident that it will resonate well with our audience. We already enjoy a significant goodwill among our users and our marketing initiatives on IPL will help in establishing us even more as credible, mass and consumer friendly brand.”
Paytm’s app regularly features among the top five apps in the country, and is currently the second most popular app on Google Play and Apple’s App store.
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.
