Ad Campaigns
Star Sports: A new logo, packaging & brand identity
MUMBAI: It was a historic moment for Star India when on 6 November at the stroke of midnight it unveiled the new identity for six of its sports channels – Star Sports1, Star Sports 2, Star Sports 3, Star Sports HD1 and Star Sports HD 2 – and its website (starsports.com). (Star Sports 3 replaced Star Cricket, while Star Sports 4 replaced ESPN and Star Cricket HD and ESPN HD were rebranded as Star Sports HD1 and HD2.)
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Today all the channels have a single logo – a star with a thinner silver outline with a streak of colours swishing into it. “The new brand identity is a metallic star with an explosive incandescent trail symbolizing the authority and passion of sports,” elaborates Star India exec VP marketing Gayatri Yadav.
The Star India broadcast design team and the UK-based brand consultancy Venturethree have created the brand identity while the broadcast package has been designed by Los Angeles based design and branding studio Capacity. Venturethree has a client roster that includes Myspace, The Times, Orange, Penguin, Reliance Industries, king.com and Discovery Communications while Capacity has done work for the NFL (national football league) and CW channel.
“The bold new star icon is to stand for a new era of sport. The star is sharp, bold and iconic. It brings strength and authority to the channel. The incandescent trail is explosive and dynamic. It brings the intensity and passion of sports to life. The fiery trail ignites and unites every sport, every player and every fan. It’s the glue that runs through everything on the channel. This expresses the fluid and dynamic nature of sports,” says Yadav.
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Sridhar feels that it is just a matter of habit for people to star using the new names
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The unified logo highlights the network’s ambition “to change the face of sports broadcasting in the country’ as well as provide world-class sports coverage to Indian sports fans. “To signal the change to the consumer, Star India is bringing all the six diverse TV channels under one brand name, Star Sports, and one purpose ‘believe’,” says Yadav.
According to Leo Burnett Chief creative officer K V Sridhar, the new logo is much more energetic and brings through the focus they are trying to put with Star Sports. “It is a Diwali colourful logo. Their biggest challenge is to merge ESPN and Star Sports. Now promoting their channels will become much easier for them. What they are doing is just the beginning because they are taking upon themselves a very beautiful and visionary strategy to make Star synonymous with sports,” he says.
Wouldn’t it be a difficult task for those used to calling the channels by their former names? “It is actually simpler than before now and it is just a matter of habit before people will start referring to a channel like- Star Sports channel 3,” quips Sridhar.
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.
