Ad Campaigns
This Daughters’ Day, Stayfree urges families to break taboos around periods
MUMBAI: India still lags behind when it comes to holding conversations about menstrual periods. According to Unicef, nearly 71 per cent of adolescent girls have no idea about periods even today. In most homes, mothers usually are the primary source of information for young girls, while fathers somehow are never a part of this crucial conversation with their daughters.
This Daughters’ Day sanitary napkin brand Stayfree set out to bridge this gap between fathers and daughters. The brand has launched a new campaign that urges fathers to be involved in period conversations with their daughters.
The hygiene brand called several father-daughter duos for auditions for a Daughters’ Day ad. However, none of them knew that the ad was for Stayfree. When the script was handed out to them, they fumbled, stammered, and stuttered their way through the subject of periods. But with each take, the conversations got easier – until at some point they didn’t need the script at all. It stopped being an audition and became a conversation between the parent and child instead.
“My mom spoke to me about my periods. That’s how it has been for generations. As part of Stayfree’s agenda to normalise periods, we realised that as long as just moms were speaking about the subject, we’d never achieve what we set out to do,” said DDB Mudra creative head – West, Pallavi Chakravarti. “But making dads have “the talk” with their daughters is easier said than done. So, we didn’t convince them. We just put them in a situation where they’d have to get over their apprehensions and get on with being a parent.”
The campaign builds on Stayfree’s award-winning campaign from 2020 – ‘It’s just a Period’, and brings to light the discomfort fathers feel in having a conversation on menstrual periods with their daughters.
Johnson & Johnson Consumer Division, India vice president Marketing, Manoj Gadgil said, “Stayfree has always stood up for enabling a healthy relationship between a girl and her periods – be it through our products or thought-provoking campaigns. Normalising period conversations is core to what Stayfree stands for and through our new Daughter’s Day Campaign we encourage parents and fathers, in particular, to let go of the awkwardness and have a conversation with their daughters on menstrual periods, one frank chat at a time.”
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.
