Ad Campaigns
Pepsi’s new ad brings SRK, Kareena and Sami together
Cola wars are hotting up in tandem with the soaring mercury. Beverage conglomerate Pepsi has unveiled yet another campaign aiming to quench the thirst of happy go lucky youngsters addicted to the stuff.
The campaign features two advertising debutantes – Bollywood actress Kareena Kapoor and sensational singer Adnan Sami. Shah Rukh Khan who has done a few commercials for Pepsi in the past joins them.
Shot in Venice, the 60-second ad film has been directed by ad film debutante Bollywood choreographer Farha Khan. The camera is wielded by cinematographer Santosh Sivan, while the ad jingle is sung by Adnan Sami and has composed by Loy, Ahsan and Shankar of ‘Dil Chahta Hai’ fame.
The ad, produced by Shah Rukh’s “Arclights & Films” has Adnan taking Shah Rukh and Kareena for a ride on a gondola in the famous waterways of Venice. A little later, Shah Rukh gets upset and walks off after Kareena drinks his Pepsi. Adnan joins Kareena in wooing Shah Rukh back with a foot-tapping song and dance jig. While Shah Rukh is easily won over by this act, he, however, still does not get his Pepsi.”
Pepsi Foods executive director (marketing) Vibha Rishi said that the new campaign takes forward the communication of “Yeh Dil Maange More” to a completely new dimension.
Pepsi had earlier got actor Amitabh Bachchan and cricketer Sachin Tendulkar to star together in an ad film for the first time.
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.
