When the COVID-19 lockdown had more than six crore small businesses struggling for survival in 2020, Cadbury Celebrations extended their heartwarming support through the Diwali campaign – Not Just a Cadbury Ad. The company didn’t just advertise for its brand, but also lent recognition to thousands of small businesses and store vendors that form part of their distribution network.
This time around, Cadbury has launched phase II of its award-winning campaign in collaboration with Rephrase.ai, and created hyper-personalized ad featuring Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan, using their generative AI technology. Conceptualized by Ogilvy India with Wavemaker as the media partner, this campaign takes hyper-personalized brand communication to the next level as it allows small businesses to make India’s biggest brand ambassador their own brand ambassador.
Ashray Malhotra, co-founder and CEO, Rephrase.ai, said the platform is proud to partner with Mondelez to help enable personalized ads for local stores in the country. “This shows the power of the Generative AI technology we’ve been pioneering for the last three years. This campaign is a perfect example of how this technology, put to good use can bring smile to people’s faces and help businesses promote themselves, which would have been impossible before,” he explained. “This is the start of the synthetic media revolution where we help businesses communicate with their customers on a one-on-one basis with their brand ambassadors, help CXOs talk to their employees personally at scale, and help run hyper-targeted ad content.”
Malhotra said he couldn’t imagine having a better partner than Mondelez who trusted Rephrase.ai with their Rakhi campaign, and now with the Diwali campaign. “We look forward to working on even closer product integrations.”
Nisheeth Lahoti, co-founder, Rephrase.ai, highlighted that this campaign was the most stringent test of their AI yet, in multiple ways. “The tech tends to be very sensitive to slight changes in position and lighting. Because we had to create avatars of Shahrukh in five different positions, each of them in the middle of an extended act, such slight changes between the training data and the actual ad were inevitable. So we had to make the tech much more robust, which ultimately involved us writing whole new AI models from scratch.”
Anil Viswanathan, Senior Director Marketing, Mondelez India, on partnering with Rephrase.ai for this campaign said, akin to last year, this year too, they are keen on supporting local businesses and stores to help them bounce back. “Our campaign ‘Not just a Cadbury Ad’ is about highlighting the spirit of generosity and understanding that enabling each other is the way to prosper. As the second phase of this campaign, we wanted to enable the small businesses to promote themselves. We are very happy to associate with Rephrase.ai to facilitate this campaign that has helped us build the first of its kind, self-serve ad creation platform for small businesses that allows them to work with/feature a mega celeb like SRK in their ads.”
Sukesh Nayak, Chief Creative Officer, Ogilvy India says the happiness that they generated in 2020 with our first edition of Not just Cadbury ad inspired us to come back with another edition of the idea. “We used the power of AI Tech to help numerous small store owners create their very own personalized ad. We hope that this initiative helps boost the sales of small store owners and makes their Diwali sweeter.”
Shekhar Banerjee, Chief Client Officer and Head – West, Wavemaker India, said the massive success of this effort in 2020 prompted us to take it to the next level in 2021. “Consumer and local store outlook is still subdued and we felt it was relevant this year to continue to extend our support to local retailers. True to our philosophy of leveraging data and tech in crafting all consumer experiences, we have pushed ourselves to greater heights and more inclusivity. The existing tech infra was tweaked to build in voice synthesis tech on top of the video and we also expanded the scope from 250 pincodes in 2020 to 500 pincodes this year, reaching 2000+ local retailers. This year we’re also adding a way for local stores as well as consumers to create their own personalized ad and promote themselves or to support their local retailers.”
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This generative media technology can essentially create a digital avatar of a real world person which then enables users or clients to create professional-quality human videos at scale, with text being the only input required. For the purpose of this ad, in a first ever for Rephrase.ai and for the world, Rephrase.ai created four different digital avatars of SRK, one for each of the 4 categories of stores (Fashion, Footwear, Kirana and Electronics) in the Cadbury distribution network.
Using these templates, store owners across India (as per the mapped pin-codes) can be featured in the Cadbury Celebrations Diwali campaign, hyper-personalized to each viewer and are also able to generate an ad for their store featuring the biggest celebrity in the world.
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