Ad Campaigns
PayU unveils ‘One PayU’ brand ad film
Mumbai: Following its recent brand refresh, PayU, a digital financial services provider, has launched the ‘One PayU’ brand ad film. This initiative aims to increase brand awareness and position PayU as a unified digital financial platform, highlighting its role in enabling digital payments, credit solutions (LazyPay and PaySense), and PayTech as a service (PaaS) through Wibmo.
The film addresses a key challenge: while consumers interact with PayU’s products and services, they may not recognise PayU as the force behind them. Whether making payments, applying for credit, or using financial services, PayU is integral to the digital commerce ecosystem, though often unnoticed by users.
PayU chief investment and transformation officer, Vijay Agicha said, “The ‘One PayU’ film highlights our commitment to creating a seamless digital financial services platform for our customers. This film is designed to raise awareness about PayU’s role as the engine behind 90 per cent of digital transactions in India. While PayU operates with quiet efficiency, powering a vast range of digital payments, this campaign creatively brings our vital role to the forefront. Our refreshed brand identity marks the next phase of growth as we unify our offerings across payments, credit, and financial services, continuing to deliver innovative, integrated solutions for all our stakeholders- businesses, consumers, and financial institutions.”
The ad film by Sideways Consulting opens with a young boy making an online purchase and thanking a PayU character for enabling the transaction. PayU is portrayed as a key enabler of digital financial activities, from loan approvals to payments, with users showing gratitude as the PayU character navigates everyday scenarios. This emphasises PayU’s role in supporting digital commerce across India.
The six-week ‘One PayU’ campaign will target a 3.5 crore audience and aim to raise awareness among five crore more consumers. While digital platforms lead the campaign, there will also be traditional media and OOH components. PayU will use programmatic and data-driven marketing, with connected TV (CTV) playing a significant role. Initially focused on eight metros, the campaign will expand to tier two and three cities, telling PayU’s story to users of its products.
As PayU expands in India’s digital financial services, the company is committed to serving all stakeholders through a unified suite of services, reflecting its core values of ‘customer Centricity,’ ‘Trust,’ and ‘Innovation.’ This marks a new phase in PayU’s mission to build a comprehensive financial services platform for businesses, institutions, and consumers.
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.
