Ad Campaigns
Tendulkar applauds Swachh Bharat campaign champs
NEW DELHI: “You either love your country or you don’t. Even as a common citizen, you can do your bit to keep your country clean by not littering, if you truly love it.”
Winning huge accolades with these words, Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Ambassador Sachin Tendulkar said: “If every person in our country gives even one hour of their time every year, we can have billion-plus cleaning hours every year!”
Speaking at a function organized by the Drinking Water and Sanitation Ministry in association with UNICEF to meet the Swachh Bharat Champions Collectors across 22 States, Tendulkar expressed his support for the Swachh Bharat team and congratulated the champions on their achievements and determination for making India Swachh and Open Defecation Free. “I feel like a part of this team”, he said.
Tendulkar also shared with the collectors his experiences of grit, determination and hard work from the cricketing field and as Swachh Bharat ambassador.
Speaking about the World Cup 2011 finals, he said, “When that moment came in 2011, when we walked inside the stadium, I knew that we were steps away from achieving our goal. At that moment, we felt the good wishes of a billion people with us. The same good wishes of the people of our country are with you today, on your path to creating a Swachh Bharat.”
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.
