Ad Campaigns
Varun & Alia become Romeo & Juliet to teach you cleanliness
MUMBAI: Did you ever think that the epic Romeo and Juliet could make a case of ‘keep your city clean’ initiative? That’s just that Adar Poonawalla’s Clean City advertisement has attempted with Bollywood actors Varun Dhawan and Alia Bhatt.
Created by Dharma 2.0, the TVCs highlight the importance of keeping your city clean and urges people to take smaller steps to do their bit for their city. The two adverts, titled ‘Romeo & Juliet’ and ‘Astronaut’ reinforce the core message of keeping a city clean by taking essential steps like throwing waste in the bin.
In the first ad, Juliet waits in her balcony to be proposed by Romeo. However, during their conversation, Juliet happens to throw a juice box outside. This disturbs our hero, who retracts the proposal and leaves her. He picks the box and throws it in the garbage bin showing how necessary it is to properly dispose waste and keep the surroundings clean.
The second advertisement features two astronauts, a woman and a man, who descend from a spaceship on the moon. The two crack a few jokes during which, the man unwraps a chocolate bar and mindlessly throws the wrapper which floats owing to lack of gravity. Here, the woman gets irked and tells him to not throw garbage on the moon, before leaving him behind and shutting him out of the spaceship. The TVC ends with her asking the audience to keep their city clean.
The quirky themes employed for the adverts are humorous and urge people to take necessary actions, in a light-hearted manner.
Dharma 2.0 head Punit Malhotra said, “The importance of a greener and cleaner environment needs to be reinforced and the two TVCs intend to do just that. The campaign draws strong humorous elements and features the two youth icons, Alia and Varun to establish a strong connect with the millennials.”
Serum Institute of India owner and CEO Adar Poonawalla added, “The Clean City initiative works tirelessly to encourage people to take smaller steps that go a long way in keeping a city clean. The initiative brings together the people in the city because it is only through their active participation that positive change can be brought about. It also tackles the task of cleaning 800kms of Pune streets on a daily basis. It is imperative to get the word out and urge other cities across the country to join in the movement. The campaign created by Dharma 2.0 is engaging and entertaining.”
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.
