We harnessed the power of ground-breaking technology to give the neighbourhood stores of India their very own A-list ambassador.
2021 saw Indian economy fighting hard to revive. Big brands with big budgets were combating business downturn. Small traders, who contributed to 80%+ of Cadbury Celebration sales, didn’t have means to compete. To secure business for Celebrations, we needed to get people to make their festive purchases from local stores.
Diwali is the most celebrated festival among Indians and is also a period of heightened consumer spending, making it an important event for almost all brands and businesses. Diwali is especially crucial for Cadbury Celebrations, given that it accounts for more than 45% of its annual sales. Selling Cadbury Celebrations isn’t the same as selling other chocolate brands. Unlike impulse purchase categories, the gifting business opportunity has a limited window. It thrives on the seasonal demand for sweet gifting during festivals. Celebrations exists to gain the greatest share of this sweet gifting pie. Consumer sentiment was at its lowest, due to a fall in household income, job and pay cuts which affected impulse buys the most. This resulted in chocolate category sales nosediving by almost 60% during each lockdown. Since consumers were not indulging as much as before, local grocers focused on stocking essentials over chocolate, compromising our shelf presence and chances of being picked up.
Introducing: ‘Shah Rukh Khan My Ad’ – a hyper-local personalised ad featuring Bollywood Superstar- Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) promoting local retailers and urging people to remember them while making their festive purchases this Diwali. We resorted to the power of tech, dynamic creative optimisation and AI to localise the campaign to 500+ pincodes with 2,500+ local business owners. Working with our tech partners, Rephrase.ai and DeltaX, we used machine learning to recreate SRK’s face and voice to take local store names in the ad. Every time a Celebrations ad was served, the user would see and hear SRK encourage purchases from specific stores that were in close vicinity of the user.
