Ad Campaigns
‘TB Cough’ shows tobacco use fueling tuberculosis epidemic
MUMBAI: India has become the first country to launch a national mass media campaign establishing the link between smoking and tuberculosis.
India’s ministry of health and family welfare (MoHFW), has launched the world’s first national tobacco control mass media campaign to warn people of the increased risk of tuberculosis (TB) and dying from TB associated with smoking cigarettes or bidis, or being exposed to second-hand smoke.
The campaign is centred on a Public Service Announcement (PSA) entitled “TB-Cough”, which has been developed and implemented with technical support from Vital Strategies.
According to The Tobacco Atlas, nearly a quarter (23.2 percent) of adult males, 3.2 percent of adult females, 5.8 percent of boys and 2.4 percent of girls smoke tobacco in India. In total, more than 2,542,000 children and more than 120,000,000 adults in India use tobacco each day.
“TB Cough,” launched to coincide with this year’s World No Tobacco Day, graphically shows that while a smoker’s cough tells the smoker they have a health problem, a persistent cough over two weeks or more could indicate that problem is TB, as smoking increases the risk of TB and dying from TB. It goes on to show a father smoking and coughing beside his daughter, noting that exposure to second-hand smoke brings the same risks. The PSA ends with the stark warning that “Every bidi cigarette brings you and those around you closer to TB.”
The campaign will be broadcast for a duration of two weeks on all major government and private TV and radio channels, as well as community radio channels, in 17 languages, for pan-India reach.
Vital Strategies president and CEO José Luis Castro commented, “Tobacco-related diseases and TB are socially and economically costly, representing real threats to development in India. Too many lives and livelihoods are being lost due to these health epidemics, so it’s important to show people that they can and should change their behavior to protect themselves and those around them. It’s also important that this campaign shows that bidis, which often escape proper scrutiny, are as harmful as cigarettes in terms of increased risk of TB.”
Health experts have long known that tobacco products like cigarettes and bidis are associated with a higher risk of TB and dying from TB – for smokers, people exposed to second-hand smoke, and bidi workers. This is one reason why civil society is advocating for bidis to be included in the highest tax slab of the new GST, along with all other tobacco products.
The 30-second long PSA was rigorously pretested with a target audience who found that “TB Cough” was ‘easy to understand’, ‘believable’, ‘made respondents stop and think’, and ‘made respondents feel more concerned’ about smoking around others. The PSA also made respondents ‘feel sympathetic to those with TB’, ‘made them feel concerned about symptoms of TB’, ‘made them more likely to visit a doctor if they had TB symptoms,’ and ‘increased their confidence to take TB medications if they got sick’. Overall, respondents understood the main message of the PSA and it resonated well with them.
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.
