Ad Campaigns
OkCupid’s Pride Month campaign #LoveAtFirstPride aims for a more inclusive world
MUMBAI: The Pride Month saw brands all across the globe striving for the right to love everyone, gender no bar. One of the most popular dating apps, OkCupid also launched an emotional campaign called #LoveAtFirstPride to bring to light stories for the first time – first dates, first decisions, first moments, first courage, first change, first freedom, first acceptance.
OkCupid CMO Melissa Hobley told Indiantelevision.com that the campaign is an initiative to celebrate the LGBTQ community on its digital platforms telling stories that are focused on them but hold true for humanity making it relevant for everyone. She sees the campaign as an opportunity to make the world a little bit more inclusive and accepting of the LGBTQ community.
Speaking about the inspiration behind the campaign, Hobley said that this Pride Month being the very first after the historic Supreme Court verdict to strike down the discriminatory article 377, deserved a celebration and the campaign tries to capture the moment by lauding love beyond the restriction of binary identities.
She said, “OkCupid users in India truly support gay marriages as indicated by the data collected from their responses and the idea behind the digital campaign was to commemorate the freedom of love which extends to all gender identities. This has been captured in the video through the stories of these influencers and the questions they have answered. Times have changed as today we can ask them these questions and they can answer them proudly. This change in perspective is what the inspiration behind the campaign was.”
The film that was hosted on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube received an overwhelming response, as shared by Hobley. Launched in the middle of the Pride Month, the video generated almost a million impressions with an engagement of 50K across platforms within just a week. “We have received an overwhelmingly positive response from the influencers, the LGBTQI community as well as the media. This has further strengthened our belief that India is finally ready for such a campaign and we are so proud to have launched something so meaningful,” said Hobley.
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.
