Not Just a Cadbury Ad ("Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad")

Why it works

India's biggest film star, advertising the shop around the corner by name. For Diwali 2021, with small retailers hit hard by the pandemic, Cadbury Celebrations and Ogilvy Mumbai worked with Rephrase.ai to recreate Shah Rukh Khan's face and voice with machine learning, so that geo-targeted versions of the ad had him name stores near each viewer; a microsite let shopkeepers and shoppers generate their own personalised versions. It built on the 2020 'Not Just a Cadbury Ad', in which the brand shared its own ad space with local businesses. It is studied as an early use of synthetic media at scale for a generous rather than deceptive end, and as purpose marketing with a hard commercial result: the brand's APAC Effie case reports 130,000 store videos created, 35% sales growth over Diwali 2019 and 41% more stores stocking Celebrations. It won the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix at Cannes 2023.