Ad Campaigns
St. Jude India’s gut-punch campaign puts childhood cancer’s cruel urban reality in focus
Mumbai: It’s not just chemotherapy that India’s poorest children with cancer are fighting—it’s the city itself. With “Renu Vs The City”, St. Jude India ChildCare Centres, in partnership with Ogilvy Mumbai, has dropped a hard-hitting campaign that yanks the curtain back on an invisible crisis: families forced to live on footpaths while their kids undergo life-saving treatment.
At the heart of the campaign is Renu Kadam, a young girl living on the pavement outside a Mumbai cancer hospital. The film follows her harrowing daily routine—dodging traffic, trekking miles for basic needs, and trying to stay hopeful amid the chaos. Her story isn’t fiction; it’s a chilling mirror to the thousands of real families who come to cities seeking free treatment, only to find no roof and no respite.
St. Jude India ChildCare Centres CEO Anil Nair said, “While cancer treatment has become more accessible and affordable thanks to government schemes, many families still face the challenge of travelling long distances and finding a safe, hygienic place to stay in cities. This film, crafted by the committed teams at Ogilvy India and Hungry Films, sheds light on the struggles of the lesser privileged during treatment.”
Ogilvy Mumbai executive creative directors, Fritz Gonsalves and Jayesh Raut added, “Working on a brand like St. Jude India ChildCare Centres is truly a privilege. The work that this organisation does is genuinely inspiring. Our sole aim is to raise awareness about the work they do and encourage donations so that the thousands of children who travel to big cities for free cancer treatment are not forced to live on the streets while undergoing treatment.”
St. Jude’s mission is simple yet urgent: offer a safe, hygienic ‘home away from home’ to kids undergoing cancer treatment. With 45 centres across 11 cities, they provide what hospitals can’t—shelter, dignity, and peace of mind. But the need far outweighs capacity. Each year, 32,000 children require such support, and thousands still fall through the cracks.
“Renu Vs The City” is not just a tearjerker—it’s a call to action. The film urges viewers to donate, advocate, and amplify. Because no child should have to choose between cancer treatment and a place to sleep.
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.
