Ad Campaigns
Colgate & BYJU’s partner to educate kids
MUMBAI: Colgate-Palmolive India recently concluded its annual Colgate Scholarship Offer that gives children from across India, a chance to win scholarships up to Rs 1 lac. While Colgate has upped the number of scholarships and the amount with every passing year, the bigger challenge that it took upon itself this year was to give something to every consumer who picked the Colgate Scholarship Offer pack and not just to the lucky few who end up winning a scholarship. In order to do that, Colgate partnered with BYJU’s, India’s leading education app, to give children access to free BYJU’s lessons.
The partnership enabled thousands of school children to avail Maths and Science lectures curated by experts at BYJU’s, through the Colgate Dental Cream pack. Each pack offered a free one-month video tutorial subscription of BYJU’s, worth Rs 999. For children who could not access the app, the duo created special audio lectures that could be availed by giving a missed call on the number provided on the pack, and also mentioned in the TVC.
Participation in the scholarship offer did not require consumers to buy the Colgate Dental Cream pack. The 2017 edition of Colgate Scholarship Offer received more than 49 lac entries from across the country.
In order to inspire many more children and their parents to avail this unique offer, Colgate felt the need to show them the stories of real scholarship winners from their own regions – and how they benefitted from this program. The thought led to the decision of choosing to film individual stories of real winners in their real homes, instead of shooting a standard, scripted TVC in a studio with actors.
After spending/shooting for a couple of days with each of the winners, across different geographies, the team came back with massive amounts of footage which was ultimately edited into short TVCs, and finally the top five stories were put on air. To make the TVC more impactful only the local winner’s story (TVC) was aired in that particular region.
Colgate-Palmolive (India) director marketing Eric Jumbert says, “The campaign revolved around the real winners from previous years’ Scholarship Offer winners telling their real stories, which made the proposition all the more compelling.”
Red Fuse Communications creative director Sanjay Sipahimalani adds, “We’ve seen kids across the country realise their potential and live their dreams. It has been humbling to see this change, and no advertising campaign could have been better than presenting the stories of these children to the world. Thus, our testimonial campaign was shot in a raw, candid manner. Our teams went to their houses, and spoke to them. What you see on television is their life, and their narrative.”
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.
