Ad Campaigns
Upstox urges us to take the first step towards investing
NEW DELHI: Days after announcing its association with the 2021 edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL), Ratan Tata-backed brokerage firm Upstox has rolled out a new campaign, Start Karke Dekho, that aims to promote better financial participation in the country.
By speaking to the fact that sometimes it’s all about just taking the first step, the campaign emphasises that with Upstox, investing is extremely simple and effortless, right from the get-go.
It features a series of videos capturing insights from everyday situations. The campaign’s underlying objective is to create financial awareness and foster an investment culture across the country.
The campaign includes commercials on television, OTT, digital, and social media platforms. While digital and OTT platforms are employed to reach out to target segments in metros and big cities, television dominates the media mix for tier-2, tier-3, and tier-4 towns.
Upstox co-founder & CEO Ravi Kumar said, “The most important aspect of the campaign is that it gives first-time users confidence to start their investment journey. At Upstox, we want to refresh the way investing is done in India, just like IPL has reinvented cricket as a sport in India. We believe that our campaign Start Karke Dekho will create a significant impact on the millions of young people who want to manage their funds better.”
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.
