Ad Campaigns
‘Make Love Not Scars’, advocates Ogilvy
MUMBAI: Building on the worldwide success of its #EndAcidSale campaign for Make Love Not Scars last year, Ogilvy has launched a powerful new campaign to benefit the cause of acid-attack survivors.
In the campaign hash-tagged #SkillsNotScars, acid-attack survivors present their skills to potential employers through a CV with a twist – a Video CV. After stating standard information about themselves and their skills, these women end their Video CV by saying that they could have well emailed a written out CV like any other candidate, but they created a Video CV so that their potential employer could also see their acid-scarred faces, and they hoped that this will not be the barrier for their employers.
Ogilvy Mumbai ECDs Kainaz Karmakar and Harshad Rajadhyaksha said: Acid-attack survivors face the added unfairness of the world cringing at the sight of their scarred faces. A huge part of the fight back against this evil, is for society to accept these innocent victims back into the social fold. And there can be no greater support than to look beyond their scars and employ these girls for the skills they bring to the table. That’s where the uniqueness of ‘Video CVs’ as a format will get the world to sit up and take notice, we believe.”
Ogilvy Mumbai associate creative director Harshik Suraiya said: More than anything else this has been a journey of learning for me. The courage, the spirit and the smile on the faces of these survivors has taught me that life is what you make of it. I hope the courage they have shown in this campaign is supported by equal courage from the world and they are welcomed with open arms and open minds.
The campaign led by Video CVs takes viewers and potential employers to a page that is a one-of-a-kind online Employment Exchange for hiring various acid-attack survivors.
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.
