Ad Campaigns
Barbie’s ‘Power Of Play’: Mattel, BBDO remind parents
MUMBAI: Mattel Asia has launched a new video for its Barbie® brand as part of its broader initiative to empower girls. Mattel Asia, takes on the widely held belief in Asia that imaginative play is not important to a child’s development, with the release of, “The Power of Play with Barbie,” a part of the You Can Be Anything brand campaign.
“Barbie is the only brand that allows girls to imagine anything they can be. With this campaign we wanted to build an emotional connection with Asian parents by introducing them to the wonderful benefits of imaginative play and storytelling with Barbie to promote confidence and curiosity, said APAC Marketing director Andrea Vitali.
Unlike in the western markets where Barbie has had decades of heritage, in Asia the campaign needed to show, not tell, millennial Asian moms the positive benefits of imaginative play that their daughters could develop when the play with Barbie. The centrepiece of the campaign is an online video structured as a social experiment. In part one of the experiment, five girls from Asia and Australia were asked to tell an imaginative story on the spot: the girls stalled, hesitated, and eventually gave up. In part two, the girls unboxed one of four Barbie products and were asked to tell a story again: this time, the girls naturally expressed inspired stories using Barbie to role-play and connect with others, demonstrating creativity, improvisation and emotional intelligence.
“Building on the global success of the Cannes Lion awarded global campaign ‘Imagine the Possibilities’ we worked with BBDO Asia to develop an engaging video that we hope will connect with moms while communicating the values of our brand,” Vitali added.
The campaign will launch across social and video platforms across Asia, including Facebook, WeChat, YouTube, and Weibo. In addition to the core video, the campaign will be supported by social-by-design content including snackable video, animated gifs and additional images to drive to e-Commerce. The campaign goes live on 25 October 2016.
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.
