Mumbai: When the lockdown had more than 6 crore small businesses struggling for survival last year, Cadbury Celebrations extended their heartwarming support through their Diwali campaign – ‘Not Just A Cadbury Ad’ – where they didn’t just advertise for their brand but also lent recognition to thousands of small businesses and store vendors that form part of their distribution network. This year, Cadbury launched phase 2 of this award-winning campaign in collaboration with Rephrase.ai, and created a hyper-personalised 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 local small businesses to make India’s biggest brand ambassador their own brand ambassador!
This generative media technology can essentially create a digital avatar of a real world person which then enables users/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 4 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!
How can this be done?
Cadbury has launched a microsite where the user has to input their location, the store category, the store name, and their contact details. The personalized video ad featuring SRK is then shared with them as an mp4 file through WhatsApp. These are essentially different versions of the same ad personalized to incorporate local store names. Watch this video here for more details.
Talking about the unprecedented campaign, Ashray Malhotra, Co-Founder, and CEO at Rephrase.ai said, “Rephrase.ai is proud to partner with Mondelez to help enable personalized ads for all local stores in the country. This shows the power of the Generative AI technology we’ve been pioneering for the last 3 years. This campaign is a perfect example of how this technology, put to good use, can bring smiles to people’s faces, and help businesses promote themselves, which would have been impossible before! 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. We couldn’t imagine having a better partner than Mondelez who trusted us with their Rakhi campaign, and now with the Diwali campaign. We look forward to working on even closer product integrations.”
Nisheeth Lahoti, Co-Founder at Rephrase.ai, added, “This campaign was the most stringent test of our 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 5 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.
Also, store names are a mix of English and Hindi words, which posed a bit of a problem because until recently, our multilingual models were notably worse than our monolingual (particularly English-language) ones. We’ve closed this gap substantially in the last few months, and particularly rapidly in preparation for this campaign.
Finally, the state of voice cloning worldwide for such a multilingual setup leaves a lot to be desired. So we’d started an in-house project to clone voices. But we expected it to take a few months to get to production-level quality if it ever got there at all. Even in our wildest dreams, we couldn’t have imagined that we’d end up deploying and using it less than a month after starting the project. It’s still far from perfect, and we expect large improvements in it over the coming months, but it was better than any other alternative for us for SRK’s voice in this campaign.”
Associating with Cadbury has truly helped reveal the power of Generative AI and Rephrase tech!
Anil Viswanathan, Senior Director – Marketing, Mondelez India, on partnering with Rephrase.ai for this campaign said, “Akin to last year, this year too, we 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 we 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 pin codes in 2020 to 500 pin codes 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.”
On another note, one of the biggest wins for Rephrase.ai and for the future of generative media technology is that Google and Facebook have given the green light in promoting synthetic media advertisements on their platforms! This will have huge benefits for all advertisers to leverage this technology and make it a mainstay of their marketing campaigns in the near future.
