In 2021, when India was still recovering from the giant second wave of COVID that swept the country, Cadbury decided to collaborate with Shah Rukh Khan to create a groundbreaking yet wholesome Diwali campaign to support struggling local businesses like kirana stores.
Still from Cadbury's Diwali Ad, 2021
For this campaign, Cadbury partnered with Ogilvy India and Rephrase.AI to create an advertisement that could be customised by any business owner for their Diwali promotions. The customised ad features King Khan saying every store’s name himself!. See the video below for an example.
Cadbury saw 1 lakh + business owners promote their stores with this ad through channels like WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube.
Rephrase.AI used their generative media technology, which uses a digital avatar of a real person and text input to create professional (i.e, realistic) videos. The main challenge they faced, according to Nisheeth Lahoti (co-founder, Rephrase.AI), was the multilingual mode of the ad, leading to them making new AI models from scratch. (Read more here)
In the advertising world, this is known as an emotional appeal (evoking a strong emotional response from the audience, learn more here). The intent behind enabling small businesses access to a big star like SRK is to help struggling owners, or as Anil Vishwanathan, Senior Director Marketing at Mondelez India (parent company of Cadbury), said:
"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."
During festivals like Diwali and Rakhi, most major brands opt to use emotional appeals in their messaging since the general atmosphere of the country at these times is one of happiness.
This AI-based advertisement pushed boundaries not just domestically, but internationally. Marketing professors in various international universities use this ad as an example of how innovation can be leveraged for marketing.
Apart from the Cadbury campaign, AI and Machine Learning has in general made it very easy for small businesses to utilise high-level marketing tools and frameworks. An example of this is Synthesia, a video creation platform that can create customised videos for you using AI. Look at what it did for us!
The importance of having experts execute your digital marketing increases exponentially as most MSMEs gain access to digital tools involving AI. At LIIT, our aim is to generate the maximum ROI for all your digital channels.
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