Ad Campaigns
Spotify to celebrate top female artists this International Women’s Day
MUMBAI: To celebrate women artists across the globe, Spotify is creating its first-ever ‘International Women’s Day Global Campaign”, which will honour female voices in the audio industry by putting the spotlight on the female artists reigning on the platform. The campaign will be supported by hashtags like #musicneedswomen, #podcastsneedwomen, and #audioneedswomen.
Elaborating the idea behind the campaign, Spotify shared in a press statement that in the US 25 per cent of the women say they’re often the only woman in a recording studio and less than 1 per cent of the charted songs were written by women only. “While these are numbers from the US (highlighted in Spotify commissioned USC Annenberg’s third annual report on the music industry), statistics across the world, including India, are likely to be similar,” read the statement.
Highlighting the top female voices in India on its platform, Spotify shared that singer Neha Kakkar takes the number one spot, with Saki Saki (Batla House), The Hook Up Song (SOTY2), and Hauli Hauli (De De Pyaar De) being her most popular tracks. She has currently over 3.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Following her are Shreya Ghoshal, Asees Kaur, Dhvani Bhanushali, and Tulsi Kumari.
Globally, Billy Eilish of the Bad Guy fame reigns not only female artists but is also the top artist of this year. Eilish has more than 10.3 billion all-time streams, and more than 60 million monthly listeners. Taylor Swift is up second, followed by Ariana Grande, Halsey, and Camila Cabello.
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.
