Ad Campaigns
PepsiCo spins the chip this Cricket World Cup 2015
MUMBAI: In a country where cricket is a religion, the upcoming ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 is the most awaited event. However, the timings are likely to play spoilsport.
With the tournament taking place in Australia and New Zealand, the matches will be aired anywhere between 3:30 am and 12 noon, IST. This means that most fans will be stuck at offices, day jobs and their daily schedules during match time.
To keep the excitement level high and to entice, enthrall and entertain all of India, Lay’s has introduced its new campaign ‘Yeh Game Hi Hai…Taste Ka.’ The campaign captures the frenzy, which grips India when the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 is on and how mismatched timings of the matches this year will create a dilemma for viewers.
PepsiCo India marketing VP Vipul Prakash said, “Cricket has been a great unifying factor and the fever that grips India is unmatched. As the official snack partner of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015, Lay’s gets the perfect opportunity to start the year through a scale marketing campaign, ‘Yeh Game Hi Hai…Taste Ka’. This campaign offers a Lay’s spin on the powerful insight of mismatched timings to appeal to consumers. We are enabling consumers to enjoy the game of cricket using the great taste of Lay’s.”
As the official snack of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015, the brand is coming to the rescue of bewildered cricket fans across the country.
Conceptualised by JWT and directed by Ravi Udyawar from RU Films, the new ad features Ranbir Kapoor, Pankaj Kapur and Lisa Hayden. The ad is a light hearted and fun take on the distance a cricket fan is willing to go to catch every World Cup match, inspite of the hurdles, the timings, or any difficulties. The track is penned by Amitabh Bhattacharya and composed by Dhruv Ghanekar of Wah Wah Music.
JWT Delhi VP and SCD Sumati Singh said, “The morning telecast timings for the ICC Cricket World Cup this year led us to the idea behind the Lay’s campaign. When a cricket loving nation looks for ways to catch the matches on television, Lay’s, with its irresistible taste, is the answer.”
The campaign will unfold with a 360-degree outreach and engagement plan. In the last few years, consumption of media has changed and on the go viewership has gone up. Hence, the campaign will cut across multiple media vehicles. Taking the insight of mismatched timings Lay’s will have significant presence across digital, retail, radio, print and TV. Innovative consumer activations and engagement activities will enable consumers to win tickets to matches in Australia and LED TVs.
Speaking about the campaign, PepsiCo India snacks category marketing head and director Rajiv Mathrani said, “The campaign will engage consumers across multiple touch points bringing the match closer to consumers.”
Mindshare principal partner Ruchi Mathur added, “As the media consumption is increasingly fragmenting, this campaign will reach consumers across multiple touch points. With seamless integrations and activations across traditional and emerging media, Lay’s will create multiple viewing opportunities and bring the World Cup closer to its 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.
