Ad Campaigns
PUMA Dives into the sporting season and launches AI campaign with Virat Kohli
Mumbai: Sports brand PUMA India has launched a unique AI-led campaign called PUMA DIVE this season. Virat Kohli, ace cricketer and PUMA ambassador took to his social media today to announce the PUMA Dive campaign along with an image of him diving and asking fans to rate it.
Virat’s fans in the past have often compared his iconic dives on the pitch to PUMA’s leaping cat logo, creating content that has gone viral several times. This season, PUMA has taken the fans’ love for spotting the cat and created a platform to reward them for every image of a dive that they upload on X (formerly Twitter).
Under the two-month-long campaign, participants will be invited to upload images of the best dives in everyday life – be it swimming, sky diving, artists at concerts, to even self-participation at PUMA’s offline events at malls and stores this season with hashtag PUMADive. With #PUMADive, the brand promises that once you see the dive, you can’t unsee it!
What makes PUMA DIVE unique is the integration of generative AI, which will assess the accuracy of each dive in relation to the PUMA’s iconic leaping cat logo, in under a minute. The closer a participant’s image of a dive matches the PUMA logo, the greater the reward they receive.
Top entries in the season have the unique chance to play a real-life cricket match against PUMA brand ambassador Virat Kohli or win his special boots. Every participant is guaranteed a reward.
“Fans are the heart and soul of the sporting culture of our country. As a brand, PUMA wants to give these fans a fun way to engage to celebrate iconic moments. Our #PUMADive campaign is a reflection of PUMA’s unique approach to capturing a collective emotion and creating innovative ways for people to own and express it. This campaign is an immersive mix of fun and AI-led technology with once-in-a-lifetime rewards such as playing a game with our star ambassador Virat Kohli, building an all-round fan experience,” said PUMA India managing director Karthik Balagopalan.
Conceptualised by Leo Burnett India exclusively for PUMA, the campaign is expected to see enthusiasts from around the world taking part in this unique engagement.
“When it is about owning the sporting season, we at Leo Burnett spotted a simple observation. Be it a diving catch at mid-wicket, or a goalkeeper saving a top-corner penalty; all dives in sport and in life resemble the PUMA logo. We leaned on AI technology to open the PUMA Dive campaign for fans, offering them dive scores for each dive they capture and share, gamifying the two-screen experience entirely. Our big plan is to make “PUMA Dive” a universal phrase because ‘once you see it, you can’t unsee it’, “ said Leo Burnett India national creative director Sachin Kamble.
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.
