Ad Campaigns
Kotex and Ogilvy India break menstrual taboos with #PeriodOfChange relay race
Mumbai: Seven March 2023 as India witnesses a robust development and growth making it a prominent emerging market on the world stage, menstrual awareness and education still remains an area for improvement. With deep-rooted cultural shame and associated stigma, periods are not spoken about openly. Menstruation poses particular challenges to young women living in India due to high levels of menstrual stigma, thus resulting in reduced quality of life for young girls and a constant hindrance in their progress.
Kimberly Clark’s Kotex, a menstrual hygiene brand in the world, that stands for change and healthy period protection, decided to change the conversation by bringing menstrual hygiene out in the open in a striking, unmissable way.
The Kila Raipur Sports Festival 2023, Kotex organised a relay race where instead of the usual baton, young women athletes passed an open sanitary pad, creating a disruptive conversation around periods. This campaign inspired moments from the race, bytes from the participants & organisers, and reactions from the audience.
Kotex globally supports the destigmatisation of periods and products, and this is a key step in building a world where women can progress on their terms. Bringing products seen as taboo to the forefront of an event that celebrates female athletes aligns with Kotex’s ongoing endeavour to challenge negative perceptions and celebrate female success.
Kimberly – Clark India marketing director Saakshi Verma Menon said, “As a pioneer in feminine hygiene globally, Kotex believes that a period should never come in the way of any women’s progress. In a country like India, where there is no dearth of talent and grit within our women, the taboo and stigma within society around periods is what holds us back from championing their progress! It is about time that we normalise periods and support our women in breaking the glass ceiling. At Kotex, we don’t just make pads, we actively identify problems women face when it comes to periods and tackle them with revolutionary solutions. Our disruptive new launch of Kotex ProHealth+ Sanitary Pads will end the old cycle of choosing between singular benefits and give young girls a chance to elevate to Healthy Period Protection. Because we truly believe – Period Or Not, She Can!”
Ogilvy India chief creative officers Kainaz Karmakar and Harshad Rajadhyaksha said that ”Even in 2023, periods are still not spoken about openly. But today the young girls of India are braver, freer, and ready for change. Partnering with brand Kotex that has always stood for change, healthy period protection and women’s progress, we held #PeriodOfChange – the world’s first relay race where young girls passed a sanitary pad to each other, instead of a baton. They did this in front of a stadium full of people at India’s longest running sports fest – the Kila Raipur Sports Festival. With Kotex #PeriodOfChange we hope to inspire more and more people to bring periods out from behind closed doors and turn this into an open conversation.”
Kila Raipur spokesperson, colonel Surinder Singh Grewal (Retd.) said, “At Kila Raipur Games, our goal has always been to provide equal opportunities to women and girls – whether it’s by encouraging participation or through equal distribution of prize money. When Kotex approached us with the #PeriodOfChange activity, we felt strongly about the message being communicated through the relay race. Period hygiene is the need of the day, but awareness of new ways of period care, even more essential. We are hopeful that this change that originated from Kila Raipur, not only impacts all women and girls in our village, but also across the globe.”
By bringing menstrual hygiene out in the open, Kotex #PeriodOfChange turned each young girl into a bearer of change and each creator into a catalyst of that change by championing the athletes and the cause.
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.
