Ad Campaigns
Friends Adult Diapers celebrates 25 years of providing freedom and comfort with their ‘Azadi Mubarak’ initiative
Mumbai – Friends Adult Diapers has announced the launch of their annual “Azadi Week celebrations” in conjunction with their Silver Jubilee anniversary. This year marks a significant milestone as the incontinence products category creator celebrates 25 years of commitment to providing comfort, protection, and freedom to its users in India and abroad.
The brand has indeed come a long way from its founder being turned away by chemists on stocking visits in 1999 to now being available 1 lakh chemists and two lakh general stores across the country.
Friends is celebrating its silver jubilee anniversary with a mega MRP slash offer on its highest selling products. The campaign hopes to battle two of the biggest barriers to the usage of adult diapers—stigma against incontinence, and a common perception that adult diapers are very expensive. “Thus, to mark our 25th Year we are taking stigma head on by proudly wearing, showing, and talking about diapers, as always. And to make the product more accessible to several more millions, we have nearly halved the prices,” said Kartik Johari, Vice President of Marketing and Commerce at Friend’s parent company Nobel Hygiene.
Celebrations coincide with the brand’s 4th annual Azadi Week, a testament to their 25-year commitment to destigmatising adult diapers in India. During Azadi Week, alongside regular campaigns on mainstream media, Friends’ 800+ member, pan-India, sales team engages in a series of awareness and educational activities such as bike rallies, free diabetes-testing camps, hospital and old-age home visits, etc. Every member of the Friends Diaper sales team also wears the diaper themselves as they go about their day, pulling up the corner of their shirt to proudly reveal this product to customers and retailers. This year, the 100+ members of Friends’ head office also joined the celebrations, sporting diapers to work on Diaper Day, 7 Aug.
According to the last official number, urinary incontinence, or the involuntary and uncontrolled leakage of urine, affects over 5 crore Indians due to conditions such as diabetes, prostate issues, menopause, ageing, neurological disorders, obesity, etc. In a conversation over call, the brand shared horror stories of elders who often stop going to work, or even leaving their homes out of fear of not being able to make it to the toilet on time.
As Friends Diapers celebrates 25 years of leadership in the market, the brand remains a seminal voice for elders and elder care in India, where the current senior population is set to double by 2050.
“It is our hope that more citizens, and the government, will join us in making sure that every day is a day of azadi for those suffering from incontinence. It is only united effort that can bring change,” said Kamal Kumar Johari, Managing Director and Founder, Friends Adult Diapers managing director & founder Kamal Kumar Johari.
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.
