Chocolate maker Cadbury never fails to awe people with their stirring and unique ad campaigns in India that go hugely popular amongst audiences. The advertisement effortlessly manages to attract audiences' love and reach millions of hearts. Cadbury ads are thoughtful and well researched, with relatable subjects that connect to Indian audiences quickly.
Be it the 'Kuch Meetha Ho Jaae' slogan or the 'Pappu Pass Ho Gaya' campaign, all have got a huge fanbase with Indians.
With Diwali approaching, the company addressed an issue that has impacted many Indians across the nation - loss of jobs and fewer inflow incomes due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
The company has taken none other than Bollywood Badshah Shah Rukh Khan for the campaign called 'NotJustACadburyAd'. The campaign allows local store owners to create an ad for their shops with SRK for free.
Shop owners' businesses were massively hit by the pandemic, thus, Cadbury aims at supporting local shop owners in India by allowing them to create an ad for their local store by using Shah Rukh Khan’s voice and face. With this, they can promote their brand without spending anything on endorsements.
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Watch the ad here:-
The ad uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allows the viewers to create their own custom ads through an exclusive website, only if they agree to share some basic information about their business. AI and machine learning are employed to recreate SRK’s face and voice in a manner that feels like the actor is saying teh local store or brand’s name in the ad, stated Cadbury.
Interested shop owners who want to create a personalised ad featuring Shah Rukh Khan can log in to the notjustacadburyad.com website that has been built totally for taking requests for generating custom versions of the ad.
How is AI used in the ad?
As per Cadbury’s website, the company has collaborated with Rephrase.ai.
Rephrase.ai specialises in building life-like "studio quality" advertisements making use of AI tools and artificially generated narrators.
Though the commercial has been praised by many and won hearts on social media, people have raised doubts about the possible deep fakes being promoted through the ad. Because AI often depends on deep natural networks to stimulate synthetic videos, whereas the ad itself can be considered similar to a deep fake.
A Twitter user has pointed out that the ad is "hugely problematic" since it was "blurring the lines between content-driven facial ML and deep fakes, it also opens up avenues for the larger small business community and citizens that such generation of "deep fake" is as easy as sending a WhatsApp message".
However, Rephrase claims not to be in the business of "deep fakes", rather it refers to their product as "facial reenactment”.
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Rephrase clients are amongst several big names across various industries and has been gaining enough as it provides a cheap alternative to real ads.
This isn’t the first time that Cadbury had used AI to create synthetic video advertisements. They have earlier been associated with Rephrase in August to produce a Raksha Bandhan ad in which actor Hrithik Roshan can be seen sending personalised greetings and messages to specific people.