Digital
Kantar Creative Effectiveness Awards: HUL dominates the digital category
Mumbai: Marketing data and analytics company, Kantar unveiled on Thursday the ads that were most effective and creative in 2021 across India. The firm tested more than 13,000 creatives for clients around the world throughout 2021. 10 percent (1300+) of those creatives were tested in India alone.The India report shortlisted over 350 ads, tested across categories, markets, target groups and media channels.
Some of the findings from Kantar’s Strategic Sparks for effective and creative digital advertising are:
- Customized and integrated content yields significantly higher ROI: Carrying forward creative stories and elements from other media amplifies the impact of digital assets.
- Shoot for instant meaning: Given the attention poor consumers and short window available, it pays to ensure that the consumers are not called to do any additional work for decoding what they are supposed to think and feel about the brand
- Ride the moment: Embrace the topical issues and trends, to engage and be relevant
- Strike an emotive chord: Well told stories open up consumers for longer format videos
- Hook them early: Promise of a fulfilling story arc, emotive journey and humour help in ensuring that consumers stay invested beyond 6 seconds.
Commenting on this year’s winners, Kantar Insights Division managing director & chief client officer Soumya Mohanty said, “The spread of ads that consumers have perceived to be both creative and effective is an affirmation of the fact that the space for creativity even in context of marketing ROI is infinite. While there is no magic formula for creating such ads, we can start with the right ingredients and refine them by testing them out with consumers. Kantar is pleased to share the learnings that we have had in the area while working with the leading marketeers in India.”
Key highlights from this year’s report identified for effective and creative TV advertising:
- Indians love to ride fulfilling story arcs: Stories create room for empathy, engagement, and vivid memories through which one could influence the way in which consumers think & feel about the brands.
- Touch of drama helps: Just the right kind and quantity of spice delivered through creative storytelling and filmmaking, elevates even the repetitive themes, to make them more personal, relevant and aspirational.
- License to be extravagant in visualization: Indians are open to suspending their disbelief for the well visualised film.
- Layer in emotional meaningfulness: Emotive contexts have the potential to make the consumers warm up to even the dry functional categories.
- Show, not tell: Integrating brand payoffs as an organic plot event in the script is a timeless approach toward creating vivid and persuasive memories.
Kantar’s collaboration with the Unstereotype Alliance has led to the development of the Unstereotype metric (UM) which Kantar now includes as a measure of gender portrayal in advertising as an integral part of its Link™ communication pretesting solution. Thus, setting a foundation for marketers to review the potential of their creative executions on this dimension to monitor progress over time.
Unstereotype metric* (UM) in the long term provides learning and context for gender progressive advertisements. UM is now measured for 14,000+ ads across 70 countries, 3,300+ brands and 251 categories.
⎯ Unstereotyping in advertisements is predicted to unlock higher marketing ROI. It signifies strong brand equity and is likely to impact short term sales as well. This impact is not only true for women, but progressive male role models also impact business outcomes across categories.
⎯ Progressive ads are more effective and trigger positive engagement. They are in general seen to be more enjoyable, relevant, different and even pleasantly surprising.
⎯ Unstereotyping affects various aspects of the brand- power, meaningfulness, difference and saliency especially seen in food & beverage, household and personal care categories.
⎯ There are clear and present rewards for brands that seek to be at the forefront of embedding progressive gender roles
Digital
Bartronics India unveils AI-powered voice app to scale agritech platform
HYDERABAD: Bartronics India Limited is stepping up its agritech ambitions with plans to launch a voice-first, multilingual AI-powered application in March, following a successful pilot across Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.
The pilot phase saw strong engagement from farmers, supported by assured produce off-take through partnerships with SNN and Origo Commodities. Drawing on on-ground feedback, the company is now upgrading the platform to enable deeper interaction, data-driven intelligence and scalable adoption across rural markets.
At the heart of the revamp is AI-enabled voice interaction in major regional languages, including English, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Kannada. The voice recognition and conversational agent framework is being developed by Ampivo Smart Technologies, aimed at transforming the app into an intuitive digital assistant for farmers.
Once launched, the platform will offer voice navigation, real-time alerts, contextual advisories, educational tools and interactive knowledge support, designed to improve decision-making across the agricultural value chain.
The application will also capture consent-led farmer data to connect users with electronic mandis and wider marketplaces, while enabling participation in sustainability-linked initiatives such as carbon credit programmes.
Bartronics India managing director Vidhya Sagar Reddy, said the voice-first approach reflects how rural communities naturally engage with technology and forms the foundation of a broader rural intelligence layer under Project Avio Agritech. The company aims to onboard 20 million farmers over the next three years.
Bartronics India currently operates across nearly 5,000 villages, delivering last-mile banking and digital financial services, and is expanding into integrated agritech and agri-trade solutions through its Project Avio platform.
Digital
Messi magic kicks off in India as immersive football experience lands
MUMBAI: When football dreams need a passport, Lionel Messi is ready to stamp it. The Messi Experience – A Dream Come True, the internationally touring immersive exhibition dedicated to one of sport’s most influential figures, is heading to India this March as part of its 2026 world tour. After successful runs across Buenos Aires, Puerto Rico, Panama, Beijing, Chicago, Mexico City, Miami, Los Angeles and São Paulo, the exhibition will make its India debut in Mumbai on March 20, 2026, before moving to Bengaluru from June 19, 2026. The shows will be staged at Century Mills in Lower Parel, Mumbai, and Bhartiya City Mall in Bengaluru.
Produced and promoted by Bookmyshow Live, the experience promises to pull fans inside Messi’s journey, not just his match highlights. “I am thrilled to see this project come to life and bring fans even closer to me both on and off the field,” Messi said, adding that the exhibition would allow Indian fans to relive the most unforgettable moments of his career.
Designed as a 75-minute, multi-sensory walkthrough, the exhibition unfolds across nine themed zones, blending artificial intelligence, immersive environments and exclusive content. Visitors can train like Messi, step into recreated match moments and explore personal stories that shaped his rise from his early days in Rosario to lifting the World Cup trophy in Qatar.
Bookmyshow chief business officer for live events Naman Pugalia said the India debut marks a milestone for football fandom in the country. He described Messi as a global cultural icon whose story transcends sport, adding that the exhibition reflects the company’s ambition to bring world-class immersive entertainment to Indian audiences.
Beyond the storytelling, the experience also features an official merchandise store and an activation zone, extending engagement beyond the exhibition halls. Whether for lifelong fans or first-time followers, The Messi Experience aims to turn football history into a walk-in memory, one that lets India play along with a living legend.
Digital
Work stress tops India’s mental health talk, not heartbreak or headlines
MUMBAI: When India opens up about mental health, the conversation keeps clocking in at work. A new conversation analysis by Consuma, an AI-native consumer insights platform, shows that workplace pressures are the most frequently discussed trigger in online conversations around mental health awareness in India. The study analysed 136,695 public conversations across Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and Instagram between January 1 and December 31, 2025. Within a focused subset of 20,272 conversations that explicitly discussed what triggers mental health awareness, nearly half 49.72 per cent pointed to work-related stressors, making employment the single largest trigger category online.
The findings echo concerns flagged at the policy level. India’s Economic Survey 2024–25 has already warned that hostile work environments and long working hours can hurt mental wellbeing and productivity. Online conversations suggest employees are feeling the strain long before policy catches up.
Among work-related triggers, poor work–life balance dominates the discussion at 24.37 per cent, followed by general workplace stress at 21.85 per cent and toxic work culture at 15.90 per cent. Long working hours account for 9.57 per cent of mentions, while job insecurity features in 7.50 per cent.
The numbers are backed by sharp, candid commentary. One user writes, “Most Indian employers overcomplicate employee wellness. Let people work async. Let them go for a run in the afternoon. Let them sleep in when their body needs it.”
Consuma notes that these findings apply only to conversations that explicitly discuss triggers for mental health awareness, not the entire universe of mental health discussions online.
The data shows that mental health discourse in India is overwhelmingly driven by adults in their prime working years. People aged 25–34 contribute 50.51 per cent of conversations, while those aged 35–44 account for 34.35 per cent. Together, they represent 84.86 per cent of the discussion.
Work stress, however, is not acting alone. Societal and educational pressures make up 33.98 per cent of trigger conversations, including societal expectations (14.42 per cent), academic pressure (13.92 per cent) and parental pressure (6.09 per cent). One widely echoed sentiment reads, “Indian parents will raise you with a roof over your head, food in your stomach, and shame in your soul.”
Taken together, the data points to a compounding “pressure stack” faced by working-age Indians balancing career demands alongside cultural expectations, education-linked anxiety and family pressure, all while chasing conventional life milestones.
Interestingly, the conversation is not limited to venting. Of the 26,311 conversations analysed for broader mental health themes, discussion is almost evenly split between core challenges (48.05 per cent) and solutions or support systems (43.81 per cent).
Mental health crises dominate the challenge cluster at 32.58 per cent, followed by stigma and lack of awareness at 20.27 per cent. On the solutions side, people lean towards culturally familiar, self-directed approaches rather than institutional pathways. Holistic practices such as music therapy and spiritual wisdom account for 17.34 per cent, practical stress management for 13.72 per cent, celebrity-led awareness for 7.64 per cent and government initiatives for 6.51 per cent.
The shift suggests that people are not only asking “what’s wrong?” but increasingly “what can I do?”even if the answers remain personal and decentralised.
Consuma’s analysis also zooms in on women’s health conversations, where mental wellbeing outweighs physical health topics. Among 1,934 women’s health conversations analysed, mental health accounts for 51.14 per cent, surpassing reproductive and gynaecological health at 37.07 per cent.
Younger adults dominate this space, with 18–44-year-olds contributing over 81 per cent of the discussion. In women’s health awareness triggers (3,489 conversations), societal factors lead at 45.2 per cent, closely followed by mental health drivers at 41.7 per cent.
Healthcare-related challenges appear less frequently at 7.4 per cent, but the tone is striking. Misdiagnosis and medical gaslighting recur as trust-breaking themes. One user notes: “Going to doctors is useless in India as a woman. First, they tell you to lose weight… Then they tell you that you are imagining it or that you are sensitive.”
The report was generated using Consuma’s AI-powered Rapid Research Platform. The dataset was cleaned for noise and duplicates and classified using a multi-coding methodology. Source-wise, the conversations came from Youtube (77,544), Twitter (41,121), Reddit (9,283) and Instagram (8,747).
In a digital space often crowded with noise, the findings paint a consistent picture, for India’s online audience, mental health conversations begin not in therapy rooms or hospitals, but at the workplace and the clock is still ticking.
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