Ad Campaigns
Now, health on call!
MUMBAI: What if you called a friend and heard a celebrity sharing health tips instead of the usual caller tune? Would you get annoyed, give a good ear or better still, make it your own to spread awareness.
Well, Leo Burnett and World Health Organisation (WHO) certainly seem to think you will change your caller tune. Which is why the duo has created a campaign titled ‘Donate your Caller Tune’ which lets you hear health advice from a celebrity and activate the same on your mobile phone in a bid to keep up the good work.
The initiative, being promoted on digital platforms, covers 12 diseases with 12 celebrities talking about them, including the likes of Amitabh Bachchan, John Abraham, Cyrus Broacha, Parineeti Chopra and Shankar Mahadevan.
Easily the world’s biggest mobile health campaign, ‘Donate your Caller Tune’ has been kicked off in India and will travel to other countries only after strengthening base here.
So why was India chosen as the launch pad? Because non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are presently the leading cause of death across the globe and in 2008, India alone accounted for 53 per cent of all such deaths worldwide. Also because India has a record 600 million mobile phone users and WHO aims to reach all of them through this campaign.
WHO India representative Dr Nata Menabde says: “Donate Your Caller Tune is an idea where people take responsibility and ownership to spread awareness of health concerns voluntarily. To us, this simple idea of using a caller tune to create mass awareness appealed a lot when presented by Leo Burnett. Caller tunes are very popular in India and it made perfect sense to leverage the power of the mobile phone to create awareness about health issues.”
Leo Burnett NCD K V Sridhar who himself suffers from diabetes, believes the campaign will benefit millions. “Diabetes runs in my family so when I got a chance to educate people, I jumped on it,” he says, giving the example of actor Imran Khan who chose to become an ambassador for cancer awareness because he lost his near and dear ones to the disease. “I usually get 40-50 calls in a day and I’m sure others do too. So, instead of hearing a song or a joke, wouldn’t it be better if we created awareness about various health related issues by donating our calling tunes for the cause?” he questions.
Apart from roping in 12 celebrities, the other herculean task for Leo Burnett was to get all mobile service providers on board. The campaign was launched in November last year with just two service providers VSNL and Airtel and it is only now that others have joined the fray.
People interested in participating need to SMS their service provider to activate the caller tune for the cause they wish to support and spread awareness about. Charges vary as per the service provider.
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.
