Ad Campaigns
Tapas Gupta conferred with “The Marketing & Advertising Person of the Year” award
Mumbai: In a glittering Awards Ceremony in Mumbai, Tapas Gupta, CMD, BEI Confluence was conferred the prestigious “The Marketing & Advertising Person of the Year” award at the fifth edition of the “High Flyers 50 Global Icon Awards 2024” by well-known Bollywood celebrity Mandakini for his outstanding contribution in the field of marketing & advertising in his long & unbroken career spanning over 45 years.
Tapas has been amongst the top advertising and marketing professionals in India who started his career with McCann – Erickson Group companies and worked with the Group for 21 years before founding his own agency BEI Confluence in 1998. Today BEI Confluence is one of the leading fully independent Indian 360 advertising agencies in India and one of the largest and most professionally managed agencies in the North.
Commenting on his achievement Tapas Gupta said, “I am delighted to receive this very coveted global award for a long journey of 46 years in Advertising & Marketing, which I love and is extremely passionate about. I really feel humbled, and thank numerous colleagues and bosses I have worked with, from whom I have learnt a lot. After over four and half decades of continuous working life, I still feel I have a lot to learn from my younger colleagues, and this hunger to learn new things keeps me going”.
‘High Flyers Global 50 Icon Awards’ was conceived five years back to recognise and celebrate exceptional accomplishments of individuals from various professional backgrounds on a global scale in 50 diverse fields ranging from science & technology, IT & computer science, fashion & lifestyle, sustainability, field of medicine, hospitality, financial services, social entrepreneurship, public service, business & commerce, marketing & advertising, to mention a few.
The global award winners come from various parts of the world including the Indian sub-continent and many of the Awards have gone to NRIs who have excelled in their respective fields and have made our country proud.
Past winners include former chief economic advisor to govt of India, Kaushik Basu (USA), reputed Bhajan singer Padma Sri Anup Jalota, Dr Mukesh Batra (Dr Batra’s Clinic), Vivek Gupta (Licious India founder), Arun Govil (reputed actor), well-known singer Talat Aziz to name a few.
Giving away the awards, Bollywood celebrity Mandakini, the chief guest at the ceremony said “I congratulate all the recipients of High Flyers 50 Global Icon Awards 2024. Success is not just about achieving your goals, but also about the journey you undertake to reach them. It’s about resilience, determination, and staying true to yourself despite the challenges you face along the way.”
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.
