Ad Campaigns
Dairy Milk & MTV host Friendship Adda, release TVC
MUMBAI: Cadbury Dairy Milk would be celebrating Friendship Day at a unique Cadbury Friendship Adda on 4 August at Sophia College, Mumbai. In association with MTV, a number of engagement activities, musical performances by college bands etc are planned.
Popular Indie band The Raghu Dixit Project would be performing at the Adda. With the message of #RealDosti at the centre of the communication, Cadbury Dairy Milk will be taking the message of urging the youth to celebrate Friendship Day through digital innovations of contextual messaging on Youtube and having a Friendship Day filter on Facebook. The message would be amplified across youth touch-points, media elements and social platforms through Live sessions and engaging content.
Mondelez India director – marketing (chocolates) Prashant Peres said, “The friendship day is a collective and one of the more popular occasions amongst the youth in schools and colleges. We wanted to use this as an opportunity to remind the digital savvy youth that Friendship Day could be a great opportunity to meet their friends in the real world. The thought is to get the youth off social media, and get them to meet, greet and wish friends in person this friendship day.”
The launch of the limited edition Cadbury Dairy Milk will be supported by a communication campaign that includes a new TVC, as well as outdoor, print and digital campaigns targeting the brands core target audience i.e. youth. The new TVC conceptualised by Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai, begins with the scene of a college campus where two friends meet in the morning on friendship’s day. While one of the friends is busy responding to the friendship day messages on her phone, the other friend is immersed in relishing a Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate that she has been gifted. A moment of realisation dawns upon her as she then hands over a Cadbury Dairy Milk to her friend as a gift, urging her to get off that phone and make real connections this Friendship’s Day.
Ogilvy & Mather ECD Neville Shah said “The world today is about digital connections. We’ve lost the pleasures of actual connections. Friendship day seemed like the right day to remind people that while the digital exists, it may be nice to meet your real friends in the real world. And placing Cadbury Dairy Milk at the heart of the story, implying that real friends celebrate together with a CDM.”
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.
