Ad Campaigns
Ragpickers’ contribution ‘Salam Hai’ picks up PACE
MUMBAI: This Gandhi Jayanti, PACE (PET Packaging Association for Clean Environment) has launched a special initiative to recognise the contribution of grassroots recyclers – the ragpickers – who make the first and biggest contribution to the recycling of PET bottles.
Kicking off a communication campaign ‘Salam Hai’ (‘Salute’) to highlight the contribution of ragpickers in the recycling process of PET bottles, a special video campaign has been released on social media.
PET (polyethylene terephthalate) is one of the most widely used plastics for packaging applications and is 100 per cent recyclable. Discarded PET bottles are collected, sorted, cleaned, shredded, and made into washed flakes, which are then used to produce products like polyester fibre.
In India, over 70 per cent of PET waste is recycled and aids livelihoods to millions employed in the entire value chain of recycling process.
‘Salam Hai’ is themed on the life of ragpickers and their contribution to the recycling industry. The video features the ‘silent heroes’ of India who are doing their part. Today, ragpickers collect around 500,000 tons per year of post-consumer PET bottles for producing polyester fibre alone, earning around Rs 10 billion per year.
PACE secretary-general P C Joshi says: “Ragpickers are the silent heroes who stand at the beginning of the recycling value chain.”
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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.
