Conceptualized and executed in collaboration with Rephrase.ai, Wavemaker, and Ogilvy, the campaign involving Bollywood Superstar Shahrukh Khan, using Rephrase.ai's generative AI technology for creating hyper-personalised ads has bagged India's first Titanium Lion Award at The Cannes Festival.

When the lockdown had more than 6 crore small businesses struggling for survival last year, Cadbury Celebrations extended their 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 hyperlocalised small businesses and store vendors that form part of their distribution network.

The campaign had SRK turn personal brand ambassador for 85,000+ retailers using regenerative AI technology.

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 

Ashray Malhotra, CEO and Co-founder of Rephrase.ai, "To align creative storytelling, intelligent advertising, and inspiring filmmaking with AI guidelines was a collaborative journey. Rephrase worked in tandem with the creative and production teams to map this narrative without compromising on the charm of Shah Rukh Khan and the warmth of Diwali. This campaign is the perfect example that demonstrates the power of the Generative AI technology we’ve been pioneering for the last 3 years. We are proud to be defining the path for personalized customer interactions!”

In the past, Rephrase.ai has created a single digital avatar of celebrities to then serve personalized videos to users. However, for this particular campaign, the narrative involved 5 different sub-ads within it or each of the 5 categories of stores (Fashion, Footwear, Optics, Kirana, and Electronics) in the Cadbury distribution network.

Store names are a mix of English and Hindi words, which posed a bit of a problem because until recently, multilingual models were notably worse than monolingual (models particularly English-language) ones. We’ve closed this gap substantially in the last few months building up to the release.

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.”

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 personalised 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.”

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. 

For the first time ever, Rephrase.ai took up a challenge and created 5 different digital Avatars of Shah Rukh Khan where the actor is in different positions and expressing different emotions. 

"We also productionised an early version of our in-house voice cloning technology which was made in less than 2 months as it allowed for scale and control," said, Shivam Mangla, Co-founder Rephrase.ai. 

The campaign resonated with millions of business owners and this brought up the challenge of scaling and doing so in real-time. We went from 1k personalized videos per day to almost 20 times the volume within 2 weeks, so every innovation, all development was essentially taking place in two shakes of a lamb's tail."

As the tech and innovation behind the execution of this campaign was the best, one of a kind, and unheard of in the entire industry, it obviously yielded unprecedented results

●     The campaign delivered 22 percent higher VTRs and 18 percent higher CTRs

●     105k users logged on to NotJustACadburyAd.com to create their own version of the ad

●     A total of 139k versions of the ad were created which were circulated through WhatsApp and other social media

●     The campaign earned PR worth 1.5Mn+ USD and 30Mn+ of ad Views

The campaign has further opened up huge possibilities for Al-based innovations that other brands are trying to leverage now.

It is also worth noting that while the YouTube ads policy does not allow or entertain synthetic media on its platform, Rephrase. ai-generated videos were white-listed and allowed to be advertised for the first time ever owing to their ethical practices and policies.