Ad Campaigns
Piyush Pandey honored with LIA Legend Award
Mumbai: Piyush Pandey, celebrated as the big daddy of Indian advertising, has been honored with the prestigious LIA Legend Award in Las Vegas on 1 October 2024. This global award, introduced in 2023, recognises industry leaders who have demonstrated outstanding creativity, leadership, and a commitment to mentoring others. Piyush is the second recipient of this honor, highlighting his immense contribution to the advertising world.
With a career spanning over four decades, Piyush has transformed Indian advertising through his work at Ogilvy, where he began in 1982. From humble beginnings, he has won over 600 national and international awards, including the Padma Shri and the Lion of St. Mark at Cannes. Known for his ability to connect with audiences through relatable storytelling, Piyush’s campaigns have made a lasting impact, including his contributions to India’s polio eradication efforts.
Having stepped into an advisory role at Ogilvy in 2024, Piyush continues to inspire the next generation of creatives. His books, Pandeymonium and Open House, reflect his belief in sharing knowledge and experience without prescription. This latest accolade is a testament to his enduring influence on the global advertising industry.
LIA (London International Awards), founded in 1986 by Barbara Levy, celebrates creative excellence across media and has evolved into one of the top international creative festivals. The LIA Legend Award honors those who not only excel in creativity but also contribute to the industry’s growth through mentorship and collaboration.
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.
