High Five: India

The first piece I’d like to showcase is the new campaign by Prega News called '#ShesCompleteInHerself'. Hats off to the pregnancy brand to start a conversation around infertility. As the video highlights, infertility affects one in six couples in India, and because of the stigma attached to it, they suffer in silence, making it essential to have a conversation around it and normalise it. The story, created by SG Dream Media, has been sensitively handled and sets a great example of how the family can respond to a situation like this. Big ups to the brand for not pushing a product placement, it would have been a disservice to the cause and the brand itself. An added message that I’d like to give to the friends, families and well-wishers of young couples is that while you mean well, please refrain from constantly asking them when they are going to share the good news.

This 'Not Just a Cadbury Ad' campaign is the perfect combination of empathy, innovation, creativity, collaboration, commerce and purpose. It’s tech that isn’t intimidating but inclusive. Congratulations to Ogilvy, Wavemaker, YouTube, Facebook and of course Cadbury and the hundreds of local businesses that got their spot in the sun with the campaign.

The next piece is the latest ad for Unacademy, an online learning app, that believes in learning beyond education. In this particular communication, it says #TeachThemYoung the value of boundaries. Brothers in India have always been taught to ‘protect’ their sisters. But in this story the father tells the son that he needs to ‘learn’ and ‘know’ when she needs him, and when she doesn’t. Essentially asking him to stay out of her business and definitely out of her bag. It takes a bold agency and brave client to put out such important ‘lessons’ and deliver it in its purest form. Really loved this piece done by Lowe Lintas for Unacademy.

From valuing boundaries to respecting privacy. This full-page ad for WhatsApp created by BBDO India served as a reminder for everyone in the power of print and WhatsApp’s strong stance on respecting and protecting privacy. The message was loud and clear, being on the front page of almost all Indian dailies, it showed the brand’s commitment to the cause. WhatsApp as a brand was built on the pillars of privacy and intimacy. The brand was built to create a safe space for people to have their most private conversations that would stay just between them. And time again the brand has lived up to that promise. From features like end-to-end encryption that ensure any message, image, video, voice note, location, audio or video conversations stay just between the sender and the receiver, and no update would change that. To ensure that even in their ads, no in-app content is ever visible.

And finally, I genuinely enjoyed this simple and quirky Netflix StreamFest ad. For the interesting use of celebrity and for its clean and effective execution.