Ad Campaigns
Colgate offers complete ‘Suraksha’ at Kumbh Mela
MUMBAI: Colgate-Palmolive (India) Ltd launched the ‘Kumbh Se Sampoorna Shuddhi, Colgate Vedshakti Se Sampoorna Suraksha' campaign at the ongoing Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj, Allahabad.
The completely localised campaign is custom-made to provide a complete all-around protection to pilgrims through a range of Kumbh-specific activities and utility elements such as brushing stations for pilgrims to brush their teeth; oral care importance drives to spread the awareness of good oral hygiene; free, large-scale sampling of Colgate Vedshakti for millions of people at Kumbh; ‘Suraksha Wristbands’ for children to write/wear their emergency contact details on a safety wristband; ‘Sampoorna Suraksha Ropes’ given to big groups and families to hold on to, to ensure that they walk together without getting lost in the crowd
Colgate-Palmolive (India) Ltd managing director Issam Bachaalani said, “At Colgate, we consistently work towards providing superior oral care and protection to all Indians, and towards caring for our communities. The Kumbh Mela gives us an opportunity to achieve both these objectives with our key target segments at an unprecedented scale.”
Bachaalani added, “Our theme at the Kumbh is complete protection or sampoorna suraksha, as part of which we are offering millions of visitors the free samples of Colgate Vedshakti toothpaste that provides sampoorna suraksha to the mouth. But that’s not all – we are also extending to our consumers ways and means to ensure complete safety of their families, as they made their way through the Kumbh Mela by handing out suraksha ropes – for families to walk together, and suraksha wristbands – for children to have an emergency contact number on their wrist.”
The Kumbh Se Sampoorna Shuddhi, Colgate Vedshakti Se Sampoorna Suraksha campaign started last month and has touched millions of pilgrims so far. Colgate Vedshakti’s impactful hoardings can be seen all over the consumer touchpoints at Prayagraj, while the sampling activity is carried out right from the transit points – at 21 highway pit stops, 9 key railway junctions and several bus stations – to inside the main Mela grounds including the akharas, rein-baseras, water point junctions, and the Colgate Vedshakti branded brushing stations.
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.
