Ad Campaigns
Publicis takes comic tack for Alia Bhatt-Ranveer Singh MakeMyTrip app TVC
MUMBAI: A few days back a couple of pictures were leaked on social media about two ads for MakeMyTrip starring Alia Bhatt and Ranveer Singh. The ads#BefikarBookKar – Taxi and #BefikarBookKar – Hotel are finally out. The attempt: to extoll the virtues of the new MakeMyTrip app and encourage travelers to download and use it to book a hotel room. Created by the Publicis Groupe, the ads also unveiled a fresh new look of the Indian travel company. Another TVC is slated to be unveiled in a month.
Produced by Amit Sharma from Chrome Pictures and shot in Mumbai, the TVCs have been created with pop-culture in mind and made in a cinematic way. The attempt has been to adopt ‘consumer behaviour’ (of what the people do in reality) in the TV spots , and spread the message in an entertaining and memorable way.
The first TVC features Alia donning a taxi driver’s avatar and Ranveer Singh as a Bengali nerd. Ranveer plays a traveler exiting a railway station and asks a taxi driver (played by Alia) for a hotel nearby. She names a few, and he asks her if there are any other ones she knows. Alia tells him to cough up Rs 500 and then passes him her phone with the Makemytrip app open for him to browse for all the hotels in the area. Ranveer surfs the app, and Alia asks him to return her phone. He cheekily demands his currency note back in exchange for the phone, clearly outsmarting her. The background by Abhishekh Arora, combined with Ranveer’s innocence and Alia’s bindaas witty approach make the TV spot quite endearing.
In the second commercial, Alia is seen in a totally different getup as a sophisticated hotel receptionist while Ranveer plays a cool flamboyantly dressed not-so cool customer. He asks Alia for a discount which she refuses. Not satisfied with her reply, Ranveer starts negotiating with her and tries to impress her. Another client enters. The receptionist directly gives a 40 per cent discount to the new guest. Shocked, Singh asks for the reason for the difference in the discount rate. The receptionist quirkily replies “aapko ek hi discount, inko make my trip discount”. The TVC cleverly depicts how the Makemytrip application provides its services at an extremely reasonably price with great discounts for its users.
“Indians normally prefer offline hotel bookings. They reach the place and then start looking for accommodation. Many think that in this way this they can negotiate a reasonable price with the hotel. But the fact is that the MakeMyTrip application gives better deals within one’s budget which does not need any negotiation and is easy,” says Publicis Worldwide-South Asia managing director & chief creative officer Bobby Pawar.
Both the TV spots shot in Hindi have been dubbed in regional languages like Tamil, Telugu and Kannada.
With a 360 degree approach, the campaign is being heavily promoted on TV on GECs and news channels radio, social media and other digital platforms. The decibel levels for the ad are going to rise during the IPL.
“I will be happy to see people booking tickets as well as hotels through the MakeMyTrip app. About our ad, as long as people talk about it and love it, we will be happy. We will see where this ad takes us economically”, concludes Pawar.
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.
