Ad Campaigns
With a smile: Himalaya promotes cleft lip awareness
BENGALURU: On the eve of World Smile Day, wellness brand The Himalaya Drug Company rolled out its flagship social impact initiative, Muskaan, to spread awareness about cleft lip and palate conditions. In partnership with Smile Train, the world’s leading cleft lipand palate charity, the initiative will support free life-saving cleft treatment to children in need.
Through the EkNayi Muskaancampaign, Himalaya Lip Care will focus on educating people about cleft lip and the availability of corrective treatments at the grassroots level. The awareness drive kickstarted with a heart-warming video capturing the inspirational story of eight-year-old Munmun. The film portrays how Munmun’s life was transformed with safe cleft surgery.
As part of the initiative, a multimedia awareness campaign has started reaching out to people across Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Smile Train India’s toll-free Cleft Helpline, 1800-103-8301, is available for people to enquire about cleft and avail free cleft treatment.
This year’s campaign featured Arjuna awardee and Commonwealth gold medallist Geeta Phogat, who extended her support to the initiative.
“As a wrestler, I have faced multiple challenges throughout my journey, but never let go of my dreams. Every child has a dream, and the ability to achieve the dream should not be limited by a medical condition like cleft. I am extremely happy to be associated with Muskaan, which has been helping children lead a healthy, happy, and fulfilling life. Such initiatives show how a simple surgery can transform the life of children and help them discover a better future,” said Phogat.
Every year in India, more than 35,000 babies are born with a cleft. This can greatly impact their ability to thrive, as having an untreated cleft can cause difficulties in eating, breathing, hearing, and speaking.Smile Train VP and regional director Asia Mamta Carroll said it is imperative to generate awareness around cleft and the importance of early medical intervention.
“There is a lack of awareness that cleft can often be treated with a safe surgery. With enhanced safety guidelines to protect both patients and health workers, our partner hospitals across Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are now slowly resuming cleft surgeries and we are supporting free treatment for cleft patients,” Carroll elaborated.
Rajesh Krishnamurthy, business director of consumer products divisionat The Himalaya Drug Company believes that the social awareness campaign is true to the brand’s spirit of spreading happiness through wellness and changing lives for the better.
“EkNayi Muskaan is very close to our hearts. Through our partnership with Smile Train India, we have brought smiles to a lot of families across India in the past five years by facilitating free cleft surgeries for their children. Our endeavour is to continue transforming the lives of many more children living with cleft and help them achieve their dreams,” he said.
Himalaya Lip Care has been consistently spearheading cleft care awareness and making efforts to bring many more smiles to children across the country through Muskaan. In addition to creating awareness, Rs 3 is contributed towards Muskaan with the sale of every Himalaya Lip Care product.
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.
