The campaign record
- Brand / agency: Cadbury Celebrations; Ogilvy Mumbai; Wavemaker Mumbai; Rephrase.ai and DeltaX are named in the case record.
- Concept: Let a famous spokesperson promote thousands of local retailers through dynamic, personalized ads during Diwali.
- Audience / objective: Indian festive shoppers and small businesses; help local shops compete for attention while keeping Cadbury relevant during the gifting period.
- AI technology: Machine learning, dynamic creative optimization, and Rephrase.ai to recreate Shah Rukh Khan’s face and voice with local store names.
- Human contribution: Retailer strategy, celebrity relationship and consent, geographic targeting, copy, brand/legal controls, and media operations.
- Production / distribution: Store and location data → rule-based selection → synthetic face/voice variation → digital delivery near the relevant store.
- Reported deployment: Wavemaker describes 500+ pincodes and 2,500+ local business owners. These are source-reported deployment figures; this report does not infer a causal sales lift.
- Strength: Personalization widens participation by giving small retailers access to celebrity and media equity.
- Criticism / limitation: Synthetic celebrity voice and face require explicit contractual scope, disclosure decisions, and a takedown process. A personalized deepfake can be benign, but it still trains audiences to accept a face saying something it did not record in that exact form.
- Lesson: Dynamic creative is most defensible when the rule is simple, the benefit is real, the person’s rights are clear, and the audience is not tricked about the interaction.
- Source: Wavemaker Global case study.
Sources & limits
Agency case account; campaign year from the research record, source page undated
- Wavemaker — Shah Rukh Khan My Ad — source publication date not stated.
Send a correction with the passage and supporting source.