Ad Campaigns
ŠKODA India moves beyond traditional outdoor – embraces programmatic OOH
MUMBAI: ŠKODA Auto in association with PHD Media roped in Brandscope India to launch a real-time programmatically propelled Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) Campaign with ROOH. The campaign leveraged DOOH to serve ads based on Vehicle Recognition in real-time with the help of intelligent ML-AI algorithms for the very first time in India.
Traditional Out of Home advertising, which is either static or pre-set to rotationally run on digital screens may be overlooked by frequent passers-by, hence ŠKODA and the DOOH experts created a campaign that targets travelers in the moment by tapping into the consumers’ real-time emotional needs and desires. As part of the process, we identified ML-AI based Computer Vision as the hero method to bring this one-of-a-kind experience to OOH. The tool mapped the exteriors of each ŠKODA carline and leveraged intelligent algorithms to serve contextually relevant messages on recognition of the mapped ŠKODA vehicles respectively.
Commenting on the campaign, Tarun Jha – Head of Marketing and Product, ŠKODA Auto India Pvt. Ltd. Said, “ŠKODA is a human brand and in all our communication, we try to bring a unique experience which our consumers can relate to better. With this campaign, we wanted to surprise our existing valuable consumers and create a brand awareness among our potential consumers. We believe in pushing the boundaries with every campaign and believe that this activity did just that.”
Speaking on the association, Jyoti Kumar Bansal, CEO, PHD Media India said, “Challenging the normal has been PHD’s unique answer to ŠKODA’s Simply Clever DNA. Leveraging technology to deliver a contextualised experience to ŠKODA customers out of home, we are creating new benchmarks for the category.”
Speaking on the campaign, Deepak Kumar, EVP – ROOH Said, “ŠKODA as a brand has been at the forefront of pioneering breakthrough initiatives driven by PHD that has successfully engaged the audiences. Secondly, the automobile giant has a plethora of variants, so creating multiple billboards at prominent locations would easily surpass the budget. Hence to create an engaging yet innovative campaign within budgets, we planned for DOOH at key traffic congregation points. The locations were chosen through Brandscope’s proprietary tool OOHZone while ROOH helped identifying the right DOOH.”
Overall 95,760 seconds of airtime was served everyday specifically for ŠKODA during this campaign by triggering-off personalized content on impersonalized medias in real-time using unique programmatic capabilities brought-in by ROOH.
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.
