Ad Campaigns
A free cup of tea with Brooke Bond Red Lebel
MUMBAI: Meeting for a cup of tea is usually an excuse to connect with people, catch up with the old ones’ and explore new connections. But, what if you land on a couch opposite a sex worker, would you stay and talk or just walk away? Ogilvy and Mather conducted a social experiment on a busy morning at Churchgate station, Mumbai to find out.
Hindustan Unilever has rolled out its campaign for Brooke Bond Red Label tea, Taste of togetherness. The video starts with setting up a booth on the busy station serving a free cup of tea to passengers. An insurance agent walks in the booth and sits to have tea, while another lady joins her and begins the conversation. While in the conversation, the insurance woman finds out that other lady is a sex worker. The awkwardness can be seen on the agents’ face, but she could not walk away in between tea and continues to share the table with the sex worker. It all warms up when the agent finds out about sex worker’s daughter and how concerned she is about her.
“The brand has developed campaigns concerning various issues like Hindu-Muslim neighbors and live-in relationships. It claims to have a purpose and through the campaigns it is attempting to build that image.” Says Ogilvy and Mather SVP Abhik Santara.
The recent two minutes 24 seconds campaign is directed and produced by maker of Ship of Theseus- Anand Gandhi and conceptualized by Ogilvy and Mather. The production team had set up a booth a night before the experiment. With the pouring rush on a weekday morning, the booth attracted many people to drop in for a free cup of tea. It had a hidden camera set up, where people’s reactions were captured. According to the production, there were mixed reaction when people confronted the sex worker. Some people just walked away and some stayed.
“The whole of idea of designing such a campaign for a tea product is that it’s a ice breaker. In the Indian context, when someone sits over a tea its personalized and people tend to share” said Ogilvy and Mather ECD Hrashad Rajadhakshya. Tea is called a social lubricant and the brand has tried to break these social barriers through putting across the table. Santara shared that many people just walked away on face, but some that stayed and spoke to the lady realized that no matter what her job was, the sex worker had as normal life like any of us.
“We have always involved in such campaign because Hindutan Lever has a whole has a purpose to it and through the campaigns like these we convey them to our consumers,” added Karmakar. The basic marketing strategy adopted in the campaigns is to reach out to people on a emotional note by breaking these usual taboos.
On choosing this particular clip, Santara said that it showed the connection between two women irrespective of their professions. How the insurance agent feels when she finds out about the sex worker’s daughter and how she is equally concerned about her daughter like any other normal parent. The campaign is titled Taste Of Togetherness – That Kind Of A Woman, this showed her first reaction.
According to the makers, they are laying out many more such campaigns and we might also see more clips from the same experiment. The campaign will only launch on the digital platform. There are separate television- specific advertisements made.
The advertisement surely leaves an impact on viewers and brings forth the thought to stay and talk or walk away? And how someone like a sex worker can be treated so differently from us? Such campaigns certainly make people to stop and think. Digital platforms have given space to brands to walk out of conventional problem solution promotions.
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.
