Ad Campaigns
PwC joins ‘Swachh Bharat’; schools access clean toilets, impacting dropout
MUMBAI: Corporates undertake social responsibility. Joining the national focus on empowering the girl child (Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao) and providing sanitation facilities in the country (Swachh Bharat), the PwC India Foundation in collaboration with NGO FINISH Society held the closing ceremony of its year-long school sanitation project in Ajmer that directly impacts 9000 girls.
The two phased project saw 11 Government Schools from this Smart City being provided with child friendly WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) facilities that included handwashing stations, supporting Operations & Maintenance (O&M) of these facilities for a year, running a 90-day hygiene curriculum to promote safe hygiene practices, refurbishing existing toilets and building new toilet complexes. Addressing all aspects of sanitation, phase I looked at six schools while phase II covered five schools, impacting over 9000 girl children.
The closing ceremony was graced by PwC India COO Satyavati Berera, and PwC India Foundation vice chairman Jaivir Singh at the Govt. Girls Senior Secondary School Beawar Cantt. students, teaching staff and the school management committee.
Singh said, “The feedback from Phase I has been extremely positive. While students and teachers took the onus of managing these facilities, we had few students who didn’t have toilet facilities at home demand the same from their parents after learning the benefits of safe hygiene at school that we facilitated. Our NGO and school supported this initiative of the students wholeheartedly. For us, this was a huge mind-set change.
Our girls are valuable and deserve a private, safe and hygienic environment to manage their bodily functions, including their period without fear and embarrassment. With the completion of the Second Phase, we are optimistic of the changes that our girls will experience with these new facilities in place.”
The broad objectives of this intervention have been to support improved sanitation and hygiene facilities as essential components of a Child Friendly School (CFS), design and construct innovative school toilet blocks which can be replicated as a model. The project aims to create an inclusive environment in schools that promote and safeguard health and hygiene, contribute towards increasing the enrollment and retention of children in schools and empower children to be change agents.
PwC India Foundation will continue to engage with the schools through FINISH Society and monitor the impact of the programme for the next couple of months.
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.
