It sits on your phone like an app and has never once asked for an update.
iPhone
Ethnix by Raymond sent 'Mandap on Wheels' through Gurugram traffic, a moving float with a decorated mandap, a live band and an onboard wedding ceremony. Madison Media ran the activation for the menswear brand. Gurugram traffic now has a wedding stuck in it on purpose.
Read more at afaqs! →
Skoda Auto India and BBH India have launched 'Says It All' for the new Slavia sedan, using unconventional conversations in films and redacted print ads. The campaign also offers its outdoor ad space to Indian businesses. The car is promoted largely by implication.
Read more at brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com →Sephora's holiday campaign stars Seth Rogen as a shopper who knows little about beauty, aimed at gift-givers who are not in the know but want thoughtful presents, Marketing Dive reports. Gift shopping has found its spokesman.
Read more at Marketing Dive →
Lush stepped away from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat in 2021 over data privacy and algorithms, and stopped posting to X by 2023. Its TikTok holds one post reading 'Be somewhere else' for 344,900 followers. Digiday reports the brand has still grown.
Read more at Digiday →P.F. Chang's has moved from 22nd to third in same-store sales growth among its competitive set, a year into a turnaround, Marketing Dive reports. Its CMO is working to recapture the casual Asian dining chain's old magic.
Read more at Marketing Dive →Starting 2 November, 7-Eleven will run 'A Convenient Love', a seven-episode Instagram miniseries promoting its Flavors of Korea menu, including Bibigo dumplings and Gochujang wings. Each episode spotlights a dish with a limited-time discount. The romance is sponsored by wings.
Read more at Adweek →Redmi India's four-part campaign for the Redmi 17 Pro and Pro Max stars Anup Soni with four creators, made with Idiotic Media. It treats drops, binge-watching, heavy gaming and constant filming as fictional offences. Most phone owners are now repeat offenders.
Read more at afaqs! →Eatopia has made a video with filmmaker Farah Khan for its Honey Jams, the brand's Bollywood debut. The jams come in Strawberry, Blueberry, Mixed Berry and Mulberry and contain no refined sugar, artificial colours or preservatives, according to the brand.
Read more at afaqs! →Titan Watches' Diwali campaign 'Chosen Family', made by Kinnect and 22Feet Tribal, tells two stories of friendships and workplace bonds that become family. One is set in a restaurant kitchen. It is part of Titan's festive Utsav communication.
Read more at afaqs! →vivo India's #JoyOfHomecoming film, made with Dentsu Creative Webchutney, follows Kabir in Dubai who cannot travel home for Diwali. Watching friends celebrate with his mother, he spots the unlit diya they always light together and decides to return.
Read more at afaqs! →DBS Bank India's 'There's always an IDEAL way to bank' campaign uses eight interconnected films, humour and familiar characters to sell business banking to entrepreneurs, ET BrandEquity reports. B2B banking has finally been given a plot.
Read more at brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com →Urban Outfitters' UO Game Day tour wraps up at Rutgers University this weekend. It builds on a back-to-campus ad that doubled as the brand's first CTV spot, Marketing Dive reports. The tailgate is now a retail channel.
Read more at Marketing Dive →Campus Activewear's latest 'Move Your Way' campaign stars Vicky Kaushal against the backdrop of corporate India. It uses humour to show a new generation making room for personal interests within workplace expectations, according to the brand's release.
Read more at The Tribune →Bacardi's Patrón is promoting a one-night-only comedy show for DÃa de Muertos with guest experiences and custom cocktails, across paid social and out-of-home channels, Marketing Dive reports. A tequila brand selling comedy is diversification of a sort.
Read more at Marketing Dive →
Hindustan Unilever's advertising and promotion spend fell 9.3% year on year to Rs 1,481 crore in Q2 FY27, even as underlying sales growth hit a 14-quarter high of 15% with 7% volume growth. Selling more while advertising less is the dream, and HUL is living it.
Read more at afaqs! →
United Spirits raised advertising and sales promotion spend nearly 57% year on year to ₹378 crore in the September quarter, ahead of the festive season. Marketing rose to 11.6% of net sales value from 7.6% a year earlier, Storyboard18 reports.
Read more at Storyboard18 →
Omnicom Global Solutions plans to scale its healthcare business through 2027, expanding a team of over 100 in India and building a practice in the Philippines from scratch, Storyboard18 reports. It follows the Omnicom and IPG integration.
Read more at Storyboard18 →
VML India says Kiran Ramamurthy will become its CEO from 1 December. Babita Baruah, the current CEO, moves to a senior regional role as head of the Ford business. The agency says the change supports growth and leadership mobility.
Read more at lbbonline.com →
Condé Nast expects about $130 million in US ad bookings for the fourth quarter, more than $35 million below its internal goal, ADWEEK reports. It booked nearly $110 million in the third quarter, about $6 million short. Vogue remains in fashion. The budget less so.
Read more at Adweek →ASCI reviewed 61 nutraceutical ads from July to September. All 60 concluded cases violated its code, with 29 advertisers not contesting and 31 failing to prove their claims, its report 'A Pill for Thought' says. The pills did not make it through review.
Read more at afaqs! →Jed Dederick, who spent nearly 14 years at The Trade Desk ending as chief revenue officer, joined creator affiliate platform ShopMy as CRO on 13 October. He says creator commerce is going through what programmatic did, with liquidity and automation.
Read more at Adweek →Vineet Sharma has left AB InBev after more than 10 years. He joined in 2016 as associate marketing director for Budweiser and had been vice president of marketing and trade marketing since January 2021, afaqs reports.
Read more at afaqs! →AudienceConnect Technologies, an AI-powered programmatic platform, has appointed Tushar Gupta, who spent over 17 years at networks including Dentsu and WPP. He will lead product and go-to-market and expand the business across MENA, APAC and Europe.
Read more at afaqs! →Isha Kapoor has stepped up to senior vice president at Publicis Groupe's Propagate India, where she joined as vice president in October 2023. She has worked on digital growth and integrated brand work for clients including Beiersdorf, Ferrero and Diageo.
Read more at afaqs! →Santosh Kumar has joined IBM as head of growth marketing for India South Asia, returning after more than seven years there between 2010 and 2017. He was previously chief marketing officer at AXISCADES.
Read more at afaqs! →Prabhakaran Thanraj, ICC vice president for marketing and business development, will also lead its communications function. He says the move brings marketing, communications, commercial strategy and fan experience closer together as the ICC grows the game.
Read more at afaqs! →Blue Buzz will handle communications, media relations and digital PR for the Yellowstone International Film Festival, held in Mumbai from 30 November to 4 December. Its work covers the independent film line-up, red carpet events and filmmaker interviews.
Read more at afaqs! →
Alphabet's Q3 revenue rose 25% to $127.6 billion, just under analyst forecasts. Ad revenue of $82 billion missed expectations of $83.5 billion, while Google Cloud revenue rose 103% to $30.7 billion, ADWEEK reports. The search box now has competition from itself.
Read more at Adweek →
Meta generated $64.6 billion in Q3 revenue, up 26% year on year, helped by higher ad impressions, pricing and AI-powered recommendations. Legal charges, negative free cash flow and up to $145 billion in 2026 capital spending raise the stakes.
Read more at TradingView →
Meta published the design of its second-generation Andromeda ad retrieval system and said it has lifted Facebook conversions 2.4% since 2025. It scores more than one billion ads a second on a single GPU server, a 100x lift, Meta says.
Read more at PPC Land →
Rhode Island says it is the first state to sue Meta over scam advertising. The suit alleges Meta helped create, refine and distribute fraudulent ads while publicly claiming sophisticated anti-fraud efforts. One example cited had more than 2,000 versions in Meta's own ad library.
Read more at upriseri.com →Meta's Ads Manager now has a Breakdown tool that shows performance data for individual creative elements, albeit with certain limitations, Social Media Today reports. Advertisers can now see which part of an ad worked, within the limits of what Meta chooses to show.
Read more at Social Media Today →Pinterest has made Programmatic Deals generally available in select markets, letting enterprise advertisers buy its display and video inventory through SSP and DSP partners. Magnite is its primary supply-side partner.
Read more at afaqs! →Stagwell's Freestar deal, announced on 26 October, brings publisher monetisation technology into its Owned Media division, Digiday reports. The holding company now sits deeper in selling the media its agencies help advertisers buy. Both sides of the table now share a parent.
Read more at Digiday →TikTok has introduced a Brand Safety Center with tools on brand suitability, intellectual property risks and AI-generated content, plus a Brand Protection Playbook and an AI Safety Essentials guide. It was presented at its APAC Responsible Media Forum in Singapore.
Read more at techedt.com →MTV's Roadies and Hustle, with digital rights at JioStar, are also on Netflix this year, and YouTube shows like India's Got Latent and Sunday Brunch are moving to Netflix too, afaqs reports. Exclusivity has entered its open relationship era.
Read more at afaqs! →Connected TV ad sellers have been reluctant to share show-level information with advertisers, leaving genre labels messy, Digiday's Future of TV Briefing says. Buyers are left guessing whether their ad ran next to a comedy or something merely labelled one.
Read more at Digiday →
Resemble AI scanned 37,768 Facebook and Instagram ad files and flagged 3,379 as AI-generated or manipulated, about one in 11. Two of those mentioned AI anywhere in the ad copy. Resemble sells software that detects synthetic media.
Read more at PPC Land →
Axis Max Life Insurance has launched campaigns on ChatGPT Ads in India with HiveMinds, a Madison World unit, making it one of the early insurers on the platform. It reaches people researching coverage and premiums through sponsored placements. The chatbot now has sponsors.
Read more at afaqs! →
Hyundai's front-page print ad for the BAYON SUV in the Hindustan Times carries a button that plays an AI voice praising the car, afaqs reports. The newspaper, long a silent medium, has acquired a sales voice.
Read more at afaqs! →
Only 16% of 4,000 US consumers trust AI agents to complete purchases for them, a Deloitte survey found, and 66% worry about how assistants use their data. Retailers are building for agentic shopping anyway. The bots are ready and the shoppers are not.
Read more at Adweek →
Using AI to write emails or generate creatives is becoming the easy part for financial services marketers, panellists said at the afaqs BankFin 360 Conference. The harder question is building it into how marketing runs, as AI moves towards autonomous decisions.
Read more at afaqs! →A brand can now produce dozens of video ads and regional adaptations in an afternoon, and so can its rivals, an afaqs guest column argues. Volume stops being an advantage, so the edge shifts to what the brand is actually saying.
Read more at afaqs! →An Ipsos study found two-thirds of American marketers would fail a basic marketing test, Fast Company reports. 40% did not know what positioning meant and 54% did not know above the line. The test, at least, was positioned well.
Read more at Fast Company →A qualitative study in Fashion and Textiles analysed 115 Instagram Reels from 20 fashion brands using fake out-of-home ads, CGI scenes on real city backdrops. It concludes viewing them can resemble the psychological state of flow. The billboard does not exist, and the attention does.
Read more at Bioengineer.org →Marketing and brand roles checked today. Every listing links to the original posting. Nobody is checking your engagement rate.
Marketing festivals and meetups coming up, each checked against its own page this morning. Business cards are optional. Opinions seem to be required.
Consumer, media and market research that landed recently. Preprints say so on the card. Findings stay where the source put them.
Announce Type: replace Abstract: Much of the manipulation in influencer content is not false but disproportionate, framing accurate facts as historic, urgent, or catastrophic. Existing approaches either verify factual claims or detect clickbait and propaganda in single-platform, single-language text, however. Preprint, not peer reviewed.
Social Media and Creators
Instagram tests 90-minute videos for the living room
Tubefilter
Instagram is testing Features, which lets creators upload horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long, as it chases YouTube's TV watch time. VP of Product Tessa Lyons said people love watching Reels together in their living rooms. Short-form video is getting longer.
Read more at Tubefilter →YouTube tests $20 payouts for creators in India, the US and Indonesia
Tubefilter
YouTube is letting a random group of Partner Program creators in the US, India and Indonesia cash out AdSense earnings at $20 instead of $100, from October 2026 payments, Tubefilter reports. The first $20 is now officially a milestone.
Read more at Tubefilter →YouTube Shorts gets seasons and episodes
socialsamosa.com
YouTube is introducing a Shorts series feature that lets creators organise short videos into seasons and episodes, with custom thumbnails and sequential playback. Viewers will be able to join a channel membership mid-watch to unlock members-only episodes.
Read more at socialsamosa.com →YouTube adds subscriptions for microdramas
Social Media Today
YouTube is adding subscriptions for microdramas, Social Media Today reports. The format drew more than 6.5 billion views in the first half of 2026, according to the company. The dramas are short and the billing is monthly.
Read more at Social Media Today →Rural Gen Z buys across 19.1 categories a month, says WPP Media and Kantar
afaqs!
Rural Gen Z consumers aged 18 to 29, a third of rural mobile users, now buy across 19.1 product categories a month, up from 17 in February 2025, the Rural Barometer Report 2026 finds. They also adopt AI tools faster than older groups.
Read more at afaqs! →Regional creators earn up to 60% less than Hindi influencers
Storyboard18
A Malayalam creator with 2.7 lakh followers was paid about ₹75,000 for a brand collaboration, while a Hindi influencer of similar size could get ₹1.25 lakh to ₹1.8 lakh a reel, agency Deckster told Storyboard18. Engagement, executives say, is often comparable.
Read more at Storyboard18 →US now classifies creators as small businesses
Digiday
The US Small Business Administration issued its first small business classification guidance for content creators on 15 October, placing them under Motion Picture and Video industries, Digiday reports. Creators were already eligible for SBA support. Now they have a code.
Read more at Digiday →YouTube Canada wants an official code for influencers
theglobeandmail.com
YouTube Canada has asked the federal government to create a distinct classification code for social media creators in NAICS, the system used for official statistics, to improve data on the group. It estimates creators contribute billions of dollars to Canada's economy.
Read more at theglobeandmail.com →Can finfluencers monetise trust and keep it?
afaqs!
SEBI chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey warned investors this month against relying on finfluencers, anonymous tips and exaggerated return claims, afaqs notes. The creator economy faces a tension between earning from financial influence and keeping audience trust.
Read more at afaqs! →What influencer fatigue means for creator marketing
Marketing Dive
Over 80% of marketers plan to increase influencer investment over the next year, Marketing Dive reports, while asking whether consumers are tired of creator content. Budgets and audiences appear to be reading different reports.
Read more at Marketing Dive →X lets users share credit on reposted images
Social Media Today
X's Original Content Rewards Program now lets more users benefit from engagement on linked graphics, Social Media Today reports. Reposting someone else's graphic used to be the whole business model. Credit on the internet is now being shared, at least officially.
Read more at Social Media Today →LinkedIn renames its Economic Graph as LinkedIn Pulse
Social Media Today
LinkedIn has renamed its Economic Graph as LinkedIn Pulse and reworked it into a channel for global labour market analysis, Social Media Today reports. The data on who is hiring now has a brand name, which is the most LinkedIn thing to happen this week.
Read more at Social Media Today →LinkedIn tests a simpler interface
Social Media Today
LinkedIn is testing new navigation that consolidates menus on desktop and mobile, with some posts getting longer lead-ins, Social Media Today reports. Navigation gets shorter while the posts get longer.
Read more at Social Media Today →Meta's Edits app adds Halloween fonts and sounds
Social Media Today
Meta's video creation app Edits now offers spooky fonts, sound effects and animations to help creators make seasonally creepy projects, Social Media Today reports. Creators who were already making unsettling content now have the official tools for it.
Read more at Social Media Today →