Ad Campaigns
See how every app is advertising for Cadbury 5 Star for free!
Mumbai: Cadbury 5 Star has taken its famous tagline “Do Nothing” a notch higher. While other brands spend a fortune on deploying ads and in-app banners during the festive season, Cadbury 5 Star has reduced its budget to zero and declared that it can now “do nothing” to advertise.
That’s because the brand has simplified its logo into a graphic of five stars. Now every time any app asks for a rating, the five blank stars on the app screen will resemble the new 5-star logo, which means every app will end up advertising for the product without even intending to. As a result, the brand is now visible across apps without the need to spend or do anything.
Conceptualised by Ogilvy, the one-of-a-kind “#5StarsEverywhere” campaign cuts through the noise of regular, high-budget promotional activities by deftly playing on what the brand does best: innovate.
Ratings have become an integral part of all D2C services, from food and grocery delivery to audio books and online shopping. Executing yet another brave idea, Cadbury 5 Star jumped at this opportunity and made itself synonymous with ratings across the board, essentially hijacking every app platform and smartly turning it around to be an ad for the chocolate.
With their new logo now present all over the internet, the brand now plans to hijack other mediums for free advertising over the coming weeks, by leveraging this crazy approach.
Speaking about this creative advertising, Mondelez India vice president of marketing Nitin Saini said, “With every subsequent Cadbury 5 Star campaign, we have strived to do something out of the box while shining a spotlight on the “Do Nothing” proposition. As a youth-centric brand, all our recent efforts were aimed to resonate with the current generation, from NothingCoin to our Valentine’s Day alibi campaign, “My Cousin’s Wedding.” Now with “#5StarsEverywhere,” the goal is to get consumers to engage with the brand in the most inventive way possible. By simply tweaking our logo, the brand has created waves by investing next to nothing in advertising and still gaining maximum eyeballs across almost every app. Steering away from the quintessential way of promoting, Cadbury 5 Star adds a fresh perspective by relaxing and leveraging the five-star review on the apps to spread the sweet message, “Do Nothing.””
Talking about the unique concept, Ogilvy India chief creative officer Sukesh Nayak said, “Cadbury 5 Star believes in the philosophy of “Doing Nothing.” To solidify this idea in young minds, we conceptualised a smart hack with “#5StarEverywhere.” This is a disruptive app takeover idea that maximises partnerships by ensuring that 5 Star’s brand logo integration happens effortlessly across apps that have a rating mechanism. In the festive season, when brands bombard consumers with thousands of branded ads, we cleverly redesigned the 5 Star wrapper to mimic the “ratings” sections that are present across most apps and subliminally turned them into ads for 5 Star. So now anyone who sees an app rating page will think of Cadbury 5 Star. Yes, you will see a 5 Star literally everywhere. The list goes across platforms, service categories, languages, and countries. What adds to the fun, thanks to our ingenious idea, is that the brand will be literally everywhere and be part of fun conversations by doing nothing beyond the regular media budget.”
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.
