Ad Campaigns
Prasoon Joshi creates new Saavn ad campaign
NEW DELHI: Saavn has announced a new campaign with renowned ad film visionary and lyricist Prasoon Joshi.
The music app has collaborated with Joshi and his team at McCann to help drive the music company’s evolution as one of the most innovative advertising voices across India’s top technology brands. The first campaign created under the association is on air now and features a comical series of five spots that promote Saavn’s innovative social features: Tag, Chat, Follow, and Share.
Saavn’s previous campaigns, featuring Bollywood star Ranbir Kapoor were launched in India and select international networks, and generated more than seven million combined YouTube views, while attracting millions of new users to the Saavn app.
Until now, Saavn’s ad creative has been completed entirely in-house. Saavn’s creative director Teddy Stern and vice president and editor-in-chief Sneha Mehta independently conceptualized, directed, and co-wrote each spot.
The new campaign, titled They Listen to Me was also directed and written by Stern and Mehta, but this time the duo’s sensibilities and creative execution is combined with the McCann team’s globally-renowned expertise. The result is a unique and fresh concept that builds on Saavn’s history of pushing groundbreaking creative.
“The last year has been pivotal for Saavn as both a brand and advertiser, starting with the Ranbir Kapoor TVC in August. The next step in our brand evolution is collaborating with the immensely-talented Prasoon Joshi and his team at McCann,” Stern said. “Music connects people, and Saavn amplifies that connection. Our app empowers our listeners to share in the joy of music with each other. That’s the Saavn ethos, and McCann is the perfect team to help us broadcast that message to millions of music lovers, in Saavn’s own quirky and innovative way.”
The new They Listen to Me campaign is a series of five short TVCs, plus creative for radio, theatrical, and digital platforms. The spots demonstrate how people of all walks of life are empowered by Saavn, through the app’s new social features. The spots feature multiple genres of music, with tracks ranging from “Jumme Ki Raat” from Kick, starring Salman Khan, to “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars.
“From concept phase to production, and now to launch, the Saavn team has been a joy to work with on this campaign,” McCann APACCEO and chairman Joshi said. “When Saavn’s creative team came to us with the idea of empowering users through Saavn Social, McCann’s creative and strategic team knew we wanted to deliver something that not only reflects Saavn’s unique and progressive brand mentality, but also tells the stories of their users – everyday people who have the power to influence their peers on a daily basis through music.”
The five spots range from 20 to 30 seconds in duration and were shot in just three days. Each spot will air in three languages (Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu), for a total of 15 television commercials. The five spots, which will roll out throughout the summer across key networks in India, are titled: “The Wrestlers,” “The Office,” “The Professor,” “The Newsroom,” and “The Dentist.”
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.
