Ad Campaigns
Taproot Dentsu launches new campaign for StarMaker
MUMBAI: Taproot Dentsu, the creative agency from the house of Dentsu Aegis Network, has launched a new campaign for the music networking app, StarMaker.
Ranked amongst the top 5 music apps of the country, this karaoke app with over 50 million users globally, offers multiple features including pitch, effects and rolling lyrics. It also allows users to appreciate or encourage one another’s singing and musical prowess, thus, ensuring steady consumer engagement.
StarMaker’s decision to launch this fresh campaign with Taproot Dentsu, therefore, clearly indicates the brand’s intent to catapult onto greater heights across India in the nearest future.
As inextricable and omnipresent as it may be, Music in India also continues to be a collective phenomenon. This is chiefly because an Indian’s perception about his/her own voice quality is so truncated that the thought of being singled out and put under the spotlight makes him/her visibly scratchy and uncomfortable.
Now, based on this very insight, this latest campaign from StarMaker showcases a montage of stories of different people who shy away from singing solo. Eventually of course, with some assistance and encouragement from the app – StarMaker, they transform from hesitant, uncertain singers, to joyful, confident and unabashed heroes. In it pertinent to note here that the key features of the app, which are also its chief differentiators, have been organically woven into the campaign story.
Speaking about the campaign, StarMaker Interactive Marketing Vice President Aviva Walsh said, “StarMaker has managed to reach millions of young hearts in India who love to sing. Yet, there were certain local inhibitions that did not allow everyone to sing out loud…just yet. Taproot Dentsu conjured up this great idea urging the commoners to break all barriers and just sing for the love of it. The Karaoke culture is set to boom in India and we thank Taproot Dentsu to stand true to our expectations in making this happen.”
Speaking about the campaign, Taproot Dentsu ECD Pallavi Chakravarti said, “Singing is in every Indian's DNA, but for a large part of the population so is stage fright. Bathroom singing is all well and good. However, when it comes to public performance, people back off. StarMaker is here to turn things around and make sure that everyone has the confidence to sing out loud and more importantly, sing to the best of their potential.”
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.
