This paper discusses that advocacy campaign as a development communication strategy has great potential in addressing institutional and structural obstacles to development initiatives, obstacles that have their roots in unequal power relationship in a community. If understood broadly, advocacy campaigns are applicable beyond engaging the news media to push for policy change, the so-called liberal advocacy campaigns. In the developing world, many NGOs have embraced advocacy as the path to more effective and strategic social change, incurring serious challenges on the authenticity of their advocacy claims. This paper prioritizes its analytical and critical dynamism on this pursuit the authentic voice of the grassroots, and proposes some well-developed participatory campaigns tools that might bring truly participatory and empowering advocacy campaigns in the future. It argues that theories and practices of advocacy have to adapt to the specific power structure with which development communication practitioners find themselves confronting. This paper has some considerable limitations. It mainly explores on the theoretical level the possibilities and problems of using advocacy in development initiatives in Southern countries. The paper itself is an advocacy for serious scholarly consideration on advocacy campaigns in the discipline of communication. Therefore, its targets are more institutional and structural, rather than tangible or case-specific; its discourse conceptual, rather than empirical.