Introduction

Focusing on the insights, information, and data from an advertising campaign created by

Cadbury featuring Shah Rukh Khan (SRK, an iconic Indian actor) released in India in 2021, this

is a detailed analysis of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) were utilized in

the execution of this ad and consider whether it would be profitable for the country’s

advertising industry to follow this path in the future for other types of products?

Local business owners can produce a free advertisement featuring SRK for their

establishments as part of this ad campaign. With the use of AI and ML, SRK's face and voice

were recreated in such a way that it appears as though the actor is uttering the name of a nearby

shop or brand. The campaign was aimed at publicizing the beginning of a synthetic media

revolution that would enable companies to interact directly with their customers through brand

ambassadors, enable CXOs to speak with employees on a large scale, and enable the distribution

of hyper-targeted advertising content.

Case Study

https://youtu.be/R3FnhpelBR0

Ideated by Ogilvy, the most recent Cadbury celebrations campaign, which was released

on Diwali (an Indian festival) in 2021, focuses on small retail stores that have seen a loss of sales

due to the pandemic. Ogilvy, Wavemaker, and Cadbury were partners in this campaign. Facebook

and YouTube were utilized in the campaign to compile the personal information of the

independent retailers. The teams intended to reach a bigger audience from across the country by

means of this creative project to raise awareness and assist the small companies so providing

these firms with the opportunity to thrive during this time of year when celebrations are taking

place (Alam, 2021). COVID-19 has proven to be particularly challenging for proprietors of small
businesses and independent merchants. The lockdown that was enforced across the country

caused many of them to lose their means of subsistence. During the pandemic, millions of people

from all over the world came together to contribute to the betterment of those who were

economically disadvantaged. Additionally, hundreds of brands have attempted to reach out to the

needy through their marketing campaigns, and donations have been made to assist those

affected in recovering from the loss of money and livelihood. Because of these initiatives,

conditions have fairly improved for the people whose companies were struggling during the

pandemic. (Fitz-Gibbon, 2021).

The commercial is not simply a marketing effort for Cadbury; it is also an opportunity to recover

for hundreds of local establishments that have suffered the loss of livelihood in recent years. The

campaign makes strategic use of the data obtained from hundreds of impacted establishments.

The promotion is conducted using radio, TV, posters, and newspapers in addition to different

social media platforms. It has become apparent to small business that the corporation is exerting
a significant deal of effort to get their products to consumers and to raise public awareness of

those products. In this way, individuals will see advertisements for businesses that are in their

own city or area if such shops are mentioned. For instance, a person in Delhi who is watching the

advertisement would be able to identify which stores in Delhi are being affected (Mogaji, 2021).

Likewise, an individual in Mumbai will be presented with the advertising based on the data

acquired from Mumbai residents. As a result, the efforts put forward by Cadbury are

commendable as they resulted in the creation of thousands of advertisements that utilised real-

time data from a variety of locales by gathering their personal information. With the assistance of

its advertising agency, Ogilvy India, it is important to comprehend that Cadbury Celebrations was

able to accomplish this goal by utilizing AI, which resulted in the creation of India's first hyper-

personalized advertisement (Fitz-Gibbon, 2021). It led to innumerable permutations and

variations of same ad to emphasize the items that were sold by far more than 1800 small stores

around the country, putting up the ones that were geographically nearest to the customer's

location. Cadbury gathered the information from around 1800 impacted retail establishments,

which included 250+ postcode locations across the cities of Lucknow, Delhi, Mumbai, Indore, and

Pune. This allowed the company to launch this fantastic program successfully (Panavou, 2021).

Customers were able to design free advertisements for their neighbourhood Cadbury

shops using the Bollywood actor SRK, courtesy of the candy company. The actor stars in the

advertisement, which takes the shape of a video, and he promotes the local business by

identifying the shop specifically during the film (Allam and Jones, 2020). The advertisement is a

component of the company's “NotJustACadburyAd” program, which focuses on boosting the

visibility of local businesses. The campaign led to a gain in transaction volume for the brand of

the company, equal to 25 percent. Both ad memory and consideration lift increased significantly,

with recollection rising by 15 percent and consideration lift rising by 6 percent, respectively

(Aggarwal, Chakrabarti, and Chatterjee, 2022). During its whole run, the campaign was able to
reach more than 100 million users. In comparison to the industry averages, View Through Rates

were four times higher on Facebook and one and a half times higher on YouTube. The number

of times consumers mentioned the brand increased, and favorable sentiment reached over 85

percent. Additionally, the campaign was successful in garnering a significant amount of earned

media and was even acknowledged by very well-respected business and trade leaders (Arya,

2020).

Technical discussion

AI can help build unique advertisements tailored to the customer by using a specialised

website that is led by SRK. As mentioned previously, people can generate video advertisements

at no cost by giving out certain information (Gaikwad, Patel, and Shetty, 2020). Cadbury claims

that it is employing a combination of machine learning and AI technologies to reproduce the

actor's face and voice so that it may use the name of the local store in the advertisement. It has

created a specialised website called "notjustacadburyad.com" to provide consumers with the

ability to generate their own unique promotional videos. On the firm's website, it is mentioned that

they have collaborated with a company called Rephrase.ai, which specializes in producing

“studio-quality advertising.” Rephrase.ai asserts that it is distinct since it generates “actual films

from scratch.” However, the advertisement creator tool offered by Cadbury might be categorized

as a ‘deepfake’ since it replicates a synthetic video using deep neural networks (Mogaji, 2021).

This means that it follows the subject's actions to make the video appear more real. A deepfake

is produced utilising AI technology. It is possible to teach a computer software to replace or

synthesize faces, as well as words and emotions. It is utilized to impersonate a person conducting

an action that the person in question did not actually conduct. There are programmes that were

developed solely for the aim of doing this, as well as programmes that have a wide variety of

functionalities, some of which include the generation of deepfake material. There is not a concrete

foundation inventor working for ‘deepfake’ currently. It was initially accepted by scientists at
academic institutions before being taken up by the general populace later (Arya, 2020). There are

professionals whose expertise is in the creation of deepfakes. Deepfake is an AI system that

simulates deep learning. Autoencoders and generating adversarial networks are the two primary

methods that fall under this category. Although they use distinct algorithms, they are working

toward the same end objective. They do this by analyzing massive volumes of data and then

using this knowledge to learn how to produce data that is comparable (Aggarwal, Chakrabarti,

and Chatterjee, 2022).

After that, the mp4 file with the personalized video advertisement featuring SRK is sent to

the recipient's WhatsApp account. These are, in essence, many iterations of the same

advertisement that have been customized to include names of local businesses (Mogaji, 2021).

"Big brands and retailers that were affected by the epidemic found their way back, but the smaller

establishments still struggle," the beginning of the 2.18-minute short stated before going on to

highlight some of the various shopkeepers and small company owners. The commercial, which

promoted local retailers and was titled "Not Just a Cadbury Ad," utilized machine learning to

reproduce the actor's face and voice to promote the establishments. It is difficult to cover all the

shops, so we offered individuals the power to build their own rendition of not just a Cadbury

commercial," the film says as it elaborates on how the film can be readily utilized by company

owners to personalize and post on a variety of social media platforms (Sood, 2022). After it was

uploaded to the internet, the film quickly gained popularity and was viewed more than 50,000

times perhaps due to SRK’s goodwill and brand image; many viewers commended the effort

made by the firm.

 Source – Kyoorius Creative Awards, 2022

In machine learning, programs learn from existing data and apply this knowledge to new

data or use it to predict data. Machine learning involves designing new learning algorithms and

improving existing ones to enable computers to act without explicit programming. These

algorithms allow computers to analyze large volumes of complex data and are used to complete

tasks like classification, regression, clustering, etc. Supervised learning includes techniques that

train the system to respond appropriately to particular stimuli. For this, the learning algorithm is

fed with a series of inputs as well as with the corresponding outputs. The algorithm then applies

this same set of rules in the future. People and robots are now creating massive amounts of data

that far exceed our capacity to absorb, interpret, and make complex judgments based on that

data. This is a problem that affects both humans and robots. AI is the cornerstone of all computer

learning, and the future of complex decision-making will be in the hands of these systems.

Computers make it easier to calculate all these potential permutations and combinations to find

the best option. A company's future decision-making will be heavily reliant on technology like AI

(AI), which will develop further into machine learning and deep learning (Arya, 2022).
 Source – Statista, 2021

Challenges

To successfully conduct a campaign of this nature, a significant amount of operational and

technological knowhow is required. Getting down to the "nuts and bolts," one can think of a few

construction blocks of the actual solution, which may include a "Master" multimedia resource with

considerate localization hooks, assimilation with socializing platforms to grasp precise location

information and situational information in a securely, on-demand video variations’ creation by

injecting location-specific shop data and increasing exposure of localized video investments at

scale and in real-time. For any of this to be possible, a solid foundation of available public cloud

and capabilities for modern graphics processing (GPU) technologies are necessary (Aggarwal,

Chakrabarti and Chatterjee, 2022).

Due to the complexity, the team in charge of execution may need to overcome several

technical and operational challenges. Some of these challenges include providing an accurate

mapping of the viewer's current location, particularly when the viewer is travelling, enabling geo-

fencing on mobile devices even when location tracking is disabled, managing real-life situations

such as handset sharing between many multiple users, and precisely mapping shops to

postcodes, precisely mapping identities across social media pages, and optimizing video rendition
while taking cognizance of the situation (Alam, 2021). Also, the automatic system or business

requirements’ engine may need to take into consideration a few "Human factors," like the

perceived public image, feelings, and recent events encompassing the particular local stores that

are featured in the advertisement, as well as smart reappraisal, if necessary, to prevent

unintended effects. Even though this may not be the first locally targeted video advertisement

campaign, it is highly likely that it will provide a good test chance for the creatives and pave the

way for advanced new marketers as well as organisations to go popular with high content energy

and ultimately hyper-personalization (Arya, 2020). In addition to this, it will provide an opening for

the introduction of digital marketing to the mid-market business group.

Although there is a challenge of regulatory costs and security, AI is quickly becoming an essential

component of the day-to-day operations that take place across all sectors. According to a

comprehensive analysis compiled by AIM and TAPMI, the AI industry in India is estimated to be

worth $7.8 billion (about INR 588 thousand crores) as of July–August 2021 (Sood, 2022). This

represents a 22 percent growth in market size in comparison to the year 2020. Over the course

of the past several years, there has been a consistent rise in the application of AI in the advertising

and marketing industries. In addition, the year 2021 witnessed the launch of several forward-

thinking and ground-breaking ads. These efforts incorporated the capabilities of AI into the

creative process and pushed the limits of what was possible in terms of media. Therefore, by

2025, India's GDP is predicted to grow by USD 450–500 billion, or 10 percent of the country's aim

of USD 5 trillion. AI deployment has been pioneered in highly digitized areas, including IT, finance,

telecommunications and media, and retail. AI technologies are expected to see a 40 percent

increase in production by 2035 (Panavou, 2021). By 2035, AI will enhance the economy by an

average of 1.7 percent across 16 industries. Since Industry 4.0 is predicted to lead to an increase

in automation, AI advocates argue the technology will merely be an evolutionary step forward.
Conclusion

From the aforementioned information, it can be inferred that a revolutionary change is

underway in the advertising sector in India. The latest Cadbury celebration campaign, which was

published on Diwali, created by Ogilvy focuses more on small retail establishments that have

witnessed a decrease in sales owing to the pandemic season. For owners of small companies

and independent merchants, COVID-19 has proven to be an especially tough time of year.

Cadbury will donate a portion of the proceeds from the commercial to these local businesses. The

campaign makes smart use of the data acquired from hundreds of establishments that are being

targeted, and consumers will see adverts for companies that are situated in their own city or area

if such stores are listed in the campaign. The advertising is a part of the company's

"NotJustACadburyAd" initiative, which aims to increase the exposure of local companies in the

community. The local shopkeepers in India who were adversely impacted by the COVID-19

outbreak have been the focus of a series of films that have been distributed throughout Cadbury's

various social platforms. These films communicate the message that the company would want to

aid these shops.

Therefore, with the success rate of this campaign, it is safe to say that AI is absolutely the next

big thing to explore further if one wants to win in the new landscape of modern programmatic

advertising.
References

Allam, Z. and Jones, D.S., 2020. Pandemic stricken cities on lockdown. Where are our planning and design

professionals [now, then and into the future]?. Land use policy, 97, p.104805.

Choi, J.-A. and Lim, K. (2020). Identifying machine learning techniques for classification of target

advertising. ICT Express, 6(3), pp.175–180. doi: 10.1016/j.icte.2020.04.012.

Arya, S., 2020. IMPORTANCE OF AI IN ADMINISTRATION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN

FUTURE. Prestige International Journal of Management and Research, p.79.

Fitz-Gibbon, B., 2021. CURRENT DISCOURSE ON GENDER IN THE ECOSYSTEM AND ITS

IMPLICATIONS. The Beauty Paradigm: Gender Discourse in Indian Advertising, p.183.

Gaikwad, S., Patel, S. and Shetty, A., 2020. Comparative Study of Machine Learning Techniques in the

Medical Field. International Journal of Computer Science and Mobile Computing (IJCSMC), 9(12),

pp.59-67.

Mogaji, E., 2021. Introduction to advertising: Understanding and managing the advertising process.

Routledge.

Panavou, F.R., 2021. How Neuromarketing, AI and Machine Learning can improve Technology Companies

and their Marketing Strategy. A food market research case using implicit and explicit techniques.

Sood, G., 2022. Troll Proof Branding in the Age of Doppelgangers. SAGE Publishing India.

Aral, S. (2021). What Digital Advertising Gets Wrong? [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at:

https://hbr.org/2021/02/what-digital-advertising-gets-wrong.

Kaput, M. (2019). AI in Advertising: What It Is, How to Use It and Companies to Demo. [online]

Marketingaiinstitute.com. Available at: https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/ai-in-advertising.

Choi, J.A. and Lewis, R., 2017. Culture and the star-power strategy: Comparing American and Korean

response to celebrity-endorsed advertising. Journal of Global Marketing, 30(1), pp.3-11.