Ad Campaigns
Smile Train’s campaign celebrates beauty and inclusivity on National Lipstick Day
Mumbai: National Lipstick Day, celebrated every 29 July, is not just a celebration of a cosmetic product, but also the confidence and strength it symbolises. July is also National Cleft Awareness Month. Smile Train, world’s largest cleft charity, saw this as an opportunity to spark meaningful conversations surrounding the importance of inclusivity and representation for individuals with clefts.
The campaign, conceptualised and executed by Tonic Worldwide for Smile Train India, is centered around the story of four beautiful women with cleft. These women have lived with apprehensions all their lives and have worn a bright lip color for the first time in their lives during the shoot of this campaign. Not just these four women, but most people born with cleft, live with apprehensions when it comes to embracing their beauty. Overall, the initiative showcases the transformative power of confidence and self-acceptance, underlining the significance of celebrating diversity and embracing every individual’s unique beauty.
Talking about the campaign, Smile Train’s senior vice president and regional director for Asia Mamta Carroll said, “At Smile Train, we believe that no matter who you are or how you smile, your unique face deserves to be celebrated. As a cleft-focused organization, we work closely with cleft affected individuals as they navigate their journey from cleft to confidence. National Lipstick Day is just one such occasion to celebrate the courage of our cleft warrior women! We are delighted to partner with Tonic Worldwide to bring focus on the stigma around clefts with this unique and powerful campaign.”
“Beauty, I believe, is absolutely personal. Imagine thinking twice about wearing a fun, pop colour that you love! That’s not right. You can’t find an image of a person with a cleft wearing a bright lip colour online. That’s not right! During the shoot, it took just one person (model) to wear a bright lip colour and that brought a smile to everyones’ face. From there on, it was all excitement, laughter and pouts. It’s pretty simple, it all starts with representation – which neither makes you too bold, nor too subtle – just normal. We’ve tried to take a small step. Hope it becomes a giant leap someday,” shared Tonic Worldwide creative director Josna Joseph.
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.
