Ad Campaigns
Z rolls out Zee Spotlight; Hyundai drives in as inaugural partner
MUMBAI: Zee Entertainment Enterprises has launched Zee Spotlight, a high-impact advertising package under its Z Rise initiative, with Hyundai Motor India stepping in as the exclusive first partner.
Billed as a clutter-busting innovation, Zee Spotlight combines premium brand touchpoints across general entertainment and movie channels — from stings, branded windows and in-show funnel placements to carousels, QR-code astons, L-bands and tags. The package is also designed to extend onto Zee5, ensuring brands reach audiences seamlessly across broadcast and digital in line with the AIDA model of awareness, interest, desire and action.
Laxmi Shetty, head of advertisement revenue for broadcast and digital at Zee, said the move was about “reimagining how brands engage with audiences in a fragmented media ecosystem.”
Hyundai’s avp and vertical head of marketing, Virat Khullar, called the tie-up “a cutting-edge platform that redefines brand storytelling,” adding that the partnership would deepen connections with consumers across India’s entertainment landscape.
With Zee Spotlight, the network is pitching a sharper value proposition to advertisers: high-frequency, high-visibility brand presence baked into viewers’ content journeys, with Hyundai leading the charge.
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.
