Ad Campaigns
Dentsu Impact, We Are Water Foundation promote #CloseOpenDefecation
MUMBAI: To mark World Toilet Day, Dentsu Impact, the creative agency from Dentsu Aegis Network, joined hands with We Are Water Foundation, CSR wing of Roca Bathroom Products Pvt Ltd and launched a social experiment ‘#CloseOpenDefecation’ at Sector 29—Gurugram, Haryana.
A makeshift public toilet was constructed, the inside of which was a site – perhaps common to 250 million people in rural India – a railway track that’s used as an open defecating area. Children and women holding placards delivered the hard facts and adverse effects of open defecation. Following the experiment several people pledged to #CloseOpenDefecation by signing up on the We Are Water foundation portal. With each sign up/pledge, the foundation contributed to the construction of more toilets.
Dentsu Impact chief creative officer Soumitra Karnik said, “As advertisers, we must create communication which can assist the society we live in, in bringing about a positive change. As communication experts we can and should create content that delivers solutions that can impact a change in our society.”
Roca India marketing head and We are Water Foundation India management trustee Mayuri Saikia said, “The problem of open defecation has always been prevalent in the country and still 250 million rural Indians continue to defecate in the open exposing them to various disease and mishaps. Through We Are Water Foundation we have been promoting healthy living, better hygiene and improved sanitation in the country and have done some truly impactful work over the years. When the idea was presented to us, we saw immense potential in it. So far, we have received a heart-warming response for the campaign as more and more are joining the cause with the foundation. As corporates and individuals, we need to realise that beyond government initiatives, we have so much power to drive the desired behavioral change towards usage of toilets and work towards the common goal to #CloseOpenDefecation.”
Prior to the social experiment, a film featuring the plight of rural India was launched on social media platforms along with teasers. This was followed up by the Social Experiment film and the option to pledge and tweet was extended to the online urban audience.
As revealed by Dentsu, ever since the movement, #CloseOpenDefecation has grabbed many eyeballs. It even trended at the no. 2 spot on Twitter for a day and has garnered 428k views so far.
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.
