Ad Campaigns
Marketing, the Dove way!
MUMBAI: There has been some exemplary advertising from Dove from the house of Unilever for over a decade now. The brand has endeavored to define beauty in a meaningful manner through its communication strategies.
The latest is a digital film which goes on to say that “Beauty is just a state of mind”. It features a two week-long social experiment by New York Times bestselling author, psychologist and body image expert, Dr Ann Kearney-Cooke, inviting women to wear a custom-made ‘beauty patch’ to help them feel more beautiful. The ladies give personal accounts of how the patch variously made them feel ‘more confident’, ‘refreshed’ and so on. At the end of the experiment, the patch is revealed to contain nothing, proving that beauty is more than just skin deep. Not surprisingly, the film which is running on YouTube garnered more than 15 million views within one week.
Not just the digital film but most of Dove’s advertising carries significant marketing lessons for other beauty brands. Here’s looking at some of them…
Stories win hearts
Advertising with a strong storyline always works. Consumers connect with a product line if it is endorsed by people with a story. Dove has successfully taken care of this aspect locally and globally.
Be constant
For people to remember advertising, it is essential for brands to be consistent in the way they project their ideas through communication. Dove over the past few campaigns has gone digital and this has helped them get greater reach.
Have a clear line of thought
Projecting an idea sharply helps. One of the reasons why Dove pops up in people’s minds is that it almost always supports a strong line of thought.
Take the video route
In the age of social media, creating visual campaigns is a plus. More importantly, videos can be shared and help measure feedback instantly. Tracking the success of the campaign becomes that much easier, and Dove seems to have got that right!
Use subtle marketing plug-ins
While rolling out digital films, brands need to go subtle on plug-ins. Two things that work best on digital platforms are curiosity and a good amount of hype. Dove has got just the right amount of both.
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.
