Ad Campaigns
Tonic Worldwide’s Smile Train campaign wins triple honours at Shorty Awards
Mumbai: Tonic Worldwide, a leading digital-first creative agency, has celebrated a momentous win at The Shorty Impact Awards 2024, clinching three prestigious accolades for its transformative collaboration with Smile Train. The groundbreaking campaign focused on inclusivity and representation, earning recognition in the following categories:
● Audience Honor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
● Gold Honor for On a Shoestring Campaign
● Audience Honor for On a Shoestring Campaign
The initiative introduced the first cleft-inclusive image repository on Shutterstock, challenging the norms of representation in visual communication. The repository serves as a readily accessible resource for brands and organisations to use in everyday communication, enabling the seamless adoption of cleft-inclusive visuals across industries such as water purifiers, FMCG, and BFSI.
This innovative campaign underscores Tonic Worldwide’s mission to drive societal progress through creativity. By creating an inclusive visual repository, the initiative has empowered brands to integrate authentic representation into their messaging, fostering narratives of diversity and empowerment.
Speaking on the achievement, Tonic Worldwide, co-founder & chief creative officer, Sudish Balan said, “These honours at The Shorty Impact Awards reflect more than just creative excellence—they underscore the importance of purposeful storytelling. With Smile Train, we didn’t just create an image repository; we built a tool for change, challenging the norms of representation in visual communication. This initiative is proof that even on limited resources, creativity can create ripples of inclusion and inspire brands to rethink how they engage with diverse audiences. This win is a reminder of the transformative power of ideas rooted in empathy.”
Smile Train, SVP & regional director for Asia, Mamta Carroll added, “The Shorty Impact Awards are validation of the power of inclusive storytelling and its ability to shift perceptions. By creating a repository that highlights the beauty and strength of women with a facial birth difference, we’re not just challenging stereotypes—we’re offering a platform for greater visibility and empowerment. This campaign has proven that even small steps can make a big impact when creativity and empathy come together for a common cause.”
The success of this campaign highlights the role of creativity in fostering inclusivity and advancing social change, reaffirming Tonic Worldwide as a leader in impactful storytelling.
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.
