Ad Campaigns
Mondelez & Carat bring live #RealDosti campaign
MUMBAI: Mondelez India, part of Mondelez International, a leading global snacking powerhouse, partnered with Carat India to launch an innovative campaign to celebrate Friendship Day on 6 August.
Titled “#RealDosti”, the campaign promoted Mondelez’s flagship brand Cadbury Dairy Milk amongst the digitally-engrossed youth of today who have forgotten the taste of the real world.
Consequently, the brand in partnership with its media agency Carat India and its creative agency Ogilvy India, built the campaign on the concept of “Adda”. For the record, an “Adda” is an informal conversation among a group of people, often for hours at an end, and usually accompanied by food.
As part of the campaign, Mondelez joined hands with MTV India to create “the Adda” for college students across Mumbai. To celebrate Friendship Day, the “Adda” was held at the Sofia College on August 4. The celebration featured popular MTV Youth Icons interacting with Gen Z and ending with a performance by the ‘Raghu Dixit Project’, a contemporary Indian folk band based in Bangalore.
Interestingly, in an attempt to get the digitally addicted youth out into the real world to experience this ‘live’ campaign, Carat India activated maximum digital touch points where the youth spend most of their time.
The campaign was launched on Facebook by creating a profile picture filter of Cadbury, a first-of-its kind for CPG brands in APAC and Globally for Mondelez. Carat also partnered with Google to kick start the latter’s global innovative concept Vogon in India. Through Vogon, a contextual video targeting programme, Cadbury Dairy Milk activated contextual messaging on popular genres consumed by youth on Youtube.
Meanwhile, #RealDosti is also smartly targeted the youth through WIFI inventories in Mcdonalds, Dominos and Café Coffee Day, amongst others. Carat also activated Zomato and Bookmyshow with precise messaging for the youth who are highly dependent on popular apps for culinary and cinematic exploration.
Additionally, Cadbury Dairy Milk and Ogilvy also developed an array of snackable digital content, sourced through multiple popular social handles for increasing consumption and ‘sharability’.
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.
