Ad Campaigns
Rohan Bopanna is with PETA against cockfighting
MUMBAI: Tennis champion Rohan Bopanna has shown his support against animal cruelty by playing a role in People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India’s campaign.
Recently qualified for the 2016 Summer Olympics, he is seen posing with rescued rooster Smack next to the words “Tennis Is a Sport – Cockfighting Is Not”. The print visual for the campaign was shot by ace photographer Sam Mohan whereas Bopanna’s hair and make-up were done by Tejal Rao.
“When it comes to cockfights …[roosters] are taught to be aggressive … and they have got knives and spurs on their feet, trying to injure one another,” said Bopanna. “Roosters in cockfights are left to die …. Cockfights never really have a victory. One dies, another one gets injured.”
Roosters raised for fighting are often confined to cramped cages and tormented to make them aggressive. Razor-sharp spurs are attached to the birds’ feet to make fights more exciting ie bloody. The birds often have their eyes gouged out and sustain broken wings and legs, punctured lungs and severed spinal cords. Those who survive are forced to fight again.
The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, prohibits forcing animals to fight. And in 2014, the Honourable Supreme Court of India ruled in favour of PETA India by making staged fights between animals illegal nationwide but cockfights are still organised in some parts of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and elsewhere.
Bopanna is currently ranked 11 in the world in the doubles category for tennis. He reached his career-high doubles ranking in 2013, when he was ranked number three in the world by the Association of Tennis Professionals.
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.
