Ad Campaigns
Savlon wins Grand Prix for Creative Effectiveness at Cannes Lions
MUMBAI: In a first for any Indian brand, ITC’s Savlon has bagged the coveted Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2018 for Creative Effectiveness. Designed and conceptualised by Ogilvy India, the innovative campaign is a rendition of the ‘Savlon Swasth India Mission’ programme unveiled by ITC’s Personal Care Products division to encourage behavioural change towards washing hands amongst children through various engaging and entertaining educational initiatives.
ITC Personal Care Products business chief executive Sameer Satpathy says, “We at ITC are indeed delighted to have won the Grand Prix for Savlon for creative effectiveness at the Cannes Lions. This award is testimony to ITC’s focus in creating an ecosystem which fosters creativity, talent, collaboration and innovation. I would like to thank the team at Ogilvy, who are our partners in rebuilding this brand and have helped us achieve both commercial and creative success. And also a big thank you to the internal teams at ITC on brand, activation and R&D.”
The Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix at Cannes is one of the most prestigious awards honouring creativity that impacts consumer behaviour, brand equity and sales. ‘Creative Effectiveness’ judges previous year’s award winning works at Cannes Lions to evaluate its impact in the market place. The Grand Prix win, is an endorsement of ITC’s commitment towards children’s hygiene and celebrates the innovative product solution as an authentic cause collaboration that has helped garner success for brand Savlon.
The ‘Savlon Healthy Hands Chalk Sticks’ won global honours at Cannes in 2017 and was also recognised as one of the world’s top 10 PR campaigns by the Global SABRE awards. The unique chalk sticks have been invited to be displayed at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) in Sydney, Australia to inspire youth on innovation that enables social good.
Conceptualised by Ogilvy & Mather, the initiative provides a unique solution to promote hygiene among children by infusing cleansers like soap into chalks. Children in different primary schools use these chalk sticks for writing on slates and when they wash hands before eating, the chalk dust on their hands work just like soap, helping them avert serious diseases. The ongoing school outreach programmes under the aegis of ITC’s ‘Savlon Swasth India Mission’ has reached out to more than 2.3 million children in over 5200 schools. The innovative ‘Savlon Healthy Hands Chalk Sticks’ as part of this outreach, have engaged nearly 8 lakh children in close to 2000 schools.
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.
