Ad Campaigns
Star Plus says #DontKillIdeas in first Ted Talks India campaign
MUMBAI: Star Plus and the global digital platform for ideas, TED, have come together to India to create a collaboration never seen before on television.
A limited edition series, Ted Talks India Nayi Soch, will launch on 10 December 2017. Airing all week long, the series aims to inspire the nation to embrace and celebrate ideas
Social conditioning, rote learning and risk aversion are the culprits that prevent us from letting our ideas come to life and are hurdles to realising our vision to be an innovation powerhouse.
This cultural insight is at the heart of the campaign of Ted Talks India Nayi Soch as the first look went live on 18 November 2017.
Two films Gudiya and Bobby Ka Idea focus on how ideas that could have potentially provided a way out of the drudgery of life are systematically discouraged and killed. #DontKillIdeas is the central theme on which the first look of the marketing campaign is based.
Star India consumer strategy and innovation president Gayatri Yadav said, “It’s an important and pertinent message from the brand that encourages new thinking (Nayi Soch), about how a seemingly ordinary idea comes with the immense power to transform lives.”
Star Plus business head Narayan Sundararaman mentioned, “Ideas are often dismissed as figments of people’s imagination. Yet, every great achievement, discovery or invention starts with an idea. It’s time we put a premium on ideas. All of us at some point in time or the other have been victims of our ideas being killed or have been responsible for killing ideas. These simple slices of life films bring out this point vividly and with a disarming charm. The films have been conceptualised by the creative agency Leo Burnett India and directed by Nitesh Tiwari of Dangal fame”.
At the show’s unveiling some months ago, Star India CEO Uday Shankar said that TV should also offer content that feeds the human passion for knowledge, stokes curiosity and inspires people. Nayi Soch is produced by Freemantle India with Shah Rukh Khan as host. This is the first time TED has moved out of the English language.
There will be a mix of speakers, thinkers and doers from India who questioned norms and brought forth ideas that have the potential to inspire many.
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.
