Ad Campaigns
Reebok shows that bruises can be good
MUMBAI: Reaffirming its position of being a tough fitness brand, Reebok India has launched an engaging social experiment on International Women’s Day that makes a compelling statement on societal insights. Being a proud women-first brand, with a rich combat training history, Reebok undertook a powerful experiment – Bruises can be good – that tapped into specific cultural and social conditioning to spark conversations to bring about a legislative change in the country.
According to the National Family Health Survey (NHFS-4), every third woman in India, since the age of 15, has faced domestic violence of various forms with 27 per cent women experiencing physical violence. Making a strong critique, the campaign unravels existing societal insights on violence and assault.
Conducted in Mumbai with select participants across both genders, spanning age groups, the experiment invited them to observe a young woman, marred with bruises. The audience reaction varied from “must be some horrid accident”, “victim of domestic abuse” to “terrible outcome of eve teasing”. In a sudden movement, the bruised girl in the film stands up to perform a martial art move, surprising the audience and undoing their reactions to her bruised body. With a voice over, it is revealed that she is a combat athlete and that her bruises are “good” as they are a proof of her strength that enables her to defeat an opponent in combat.
Highlighting that most of us perceive bruises and marks on women to be a result of violence, Reebok has made a petition on Change.org to make self-defense a mandatory part of school and college curricula for female students; Reebok wants to send this to the Ministry of Women and Child Development and is calling out to everyone to sign this petition. Reebok partnered with e-commerce portal Myntra to spread awareness about the cause and the petition that leads it.
People can sign up for this petition at: http://www.bruisescanbegood.com/
Reebok India senior marketing director Silvia Tallon says, “Our idea behind the campaign was to showcase the skewed lens with which our society views bruises and women. The engrained perceptions of bruises being violence inflicted shadows the inner strength of the woman and allows us to undermine them. Since combat training is in our brand gene, Reebok honours these bruises as a mark of physical strength and mental toughness that can face any challenge.”
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.
