Ad Campaigns
PIL against Sahara ad reportedly denigrating Sebi
NEW DELHI: The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court is expected to hear later this week a public interest litigation alleging that a full page advertisement dated 17 March 2013 by Sahara India Parivar and Subrata Roy Sahara are against the provisions of law.
The PIL filed by IPS officer Amitabh Thakur and social activist Nutan Thakur says that a private person and a private organisation have openly denigrated and accused Sebi, which is a statutory body established to safeguard the interests of investors and to act as the market regulator.
The ad has also criticised Justice B N Agarwal’s conduct while both Sebi and Justice Agarwal are only performing their official duty. The matter is still sub-judice before the Supreme Court and hence these people could have presented their grievance there.
This act of criticising Sebi through an ad prima-facie is alleged to be a criminal misconduct under sections 186 and 189 IPC and provisions of Companies Act 1956.
The petitioners have sought a complete ban on all advertisements where any constitutional or statutory body is criticised. They have also asked for enquiry into the issue and necessary subsequent legal actions against Sahara India parivar and Subrata Roy.
The PIL is expected to be heard on 22 March before the Bench of Chief Justice Shiva Kirti Singh and Justice D K Arora.
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.
