Ad Campaigns
Virat Kohli stays cool while shaking a leg in new Blue Star TVC
NEW DELHI: Air conditioning and commercial refrigeration company Blue Star has released a pan-India ad campaign starring brand ambassador Virat Kohli.
Built around the thought of ‘Happiness is a fast-cooling AC’, the TV commercials show Kohli rescuing helpless people from a slow cooling AC. The print advertisements featuring the Team India captain make a strong pitch for a fast-cooling AC. The campaign, conceptualised by FCB Interface, is also being rolled out on platforms such as OOH, digital, dealership collaterals and other key touch points.
Blue Star managing director B Thiagarajan said, “Our continuous efforts have enabled us to offer something new every season and I am glad that this time around, it is our new range of ‘fast cooling’ ACs. Designed to tackle harsh summers, this new range is indeed the need of the hour. We have rolled-out a new peppy campaign featuring Virat Kohli which focuses on the key benefit of ‘fast-cooling’ of this new range. With this campaign, we have further extended our association with Virat as his mass appeal has been enabling us to connect to and widen our TG to include tier-3/4/5 markets.”
FCB Interface chief creative officer Robby Mathew added, “When an AC does not cool fast, it only adds to our discomfort. This is the insight that the campaign builds on, with a dash of fun and the kind of energy that Virat Kohli brings.”
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.
