Ad Campaigns
Ogilvy creative for HUL’s Start A Little Good initiative
MUMBAI: Promoting ‘Start a Little Good’, the CSR initiative of Hindustan Unilever Ltd, Ogilvy Mumbai has created a thought-provoking film centred on water conservation.
Produced by Little Lamb Films, the film opens on an urban shower booth in the middle of a rural village. A villager steps inside out of curiosity. He turns on the shower and to everyone’s surprise, he starts drinking the water to quench his thirst instead of taking a bath. One by one, all the villagers queue up to drink water from the shower. The juxtaposition thus beautifully highlights the value of water and the need to conserve it.
Ogilvy India vice chairman and group CCO Sonal Dabral said, “When a powerful initiative, like ‘Start A Little Good’, meets a fresh creative thought, the result is pure magic. ‘The Shower’ is a great example of the impact cut-through creativity can have in promoting critical issues like water conservation. Kudos to HUL for all the work they are doing in this area to help improve the lives of millions across India. Proud of our teams at Ogilvy for creating this brilliant moving evocative piece of work.”
Ogilvy India (West) chief creative officers Kainaz Karmakar and Harshad Rajadhyaksha noted, “Unless we understand the value of water, we will not be motivated to save it. This is the simple insight we had when we started to think of this film. From there came the idea of taking a city shower into a village and showing how almost half a village can drink water, in the time it takes one city dweller to take a shower. If the film punches our conscience, it is meant to. The society needs a mirror to see its behaviour and the film is holding up that mirror.”
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.
