Diwali is one of the most significant Hindu holidays commemorated with a huge festival celebration. Every year, brands try to create the kindest and most humane advertisements for the festival. 2020’s Not Just A Cadbury Ad Campaign became a huge success and directed significant support for local stores and retailers.

For the 2020 campaign, the producers used YouTube Pin Code Targeting, YouTube Director Mix, and the Google Maps API to tag local stores in eight municipalities. They also geo-targeted ads featuring custom local shop names to advertise them locally. For 2021, they planned to go even further.

The project in numbers

8

Indian municipalities participated in the project

10x

Faster production schedule for using synthetic media

1800+

Local stores got personalized ads from Shahrukh Khan

Personalizing not only the video message but the speech

When creative producers like Mondelēz International, Ogilvy, and Wavemaker come together, you can expect another revolution in the world of advertising. This year, the idea was to use artificial intelligence to not only innovate the messages of the video ads but the on-screen speech as well.

For the advertisement to attract even more attention to local shops, the producers decided to cast an Indian star of the highest caliber, Shahrukh Khan (also known as SRK).

The ad featured Khan’s digital avatar. The advertisements and the avatar’s speech differed depending on which of the four categories it was representing:

• Fashion
• Footwear
• Electronics
• Grocery stores

The result was a unique video where the movie star represented local sellers, which seems impossible given the size and number of stores and the scale of SRK’s celebrity.

This year, ad creators enabled local sellers to register themselves for participation in ads. Thousands of local retailers across the country entered their credentials and received personalized ads from Shahrukh Khan, an advertisement that they would not have otherwise been able to afford.

Watch the video to see the ad with a behind-the-scenes explanation:

AI and Machine Learning Made It Possible to Create an Actor’s Digital Avatar and Clone His Voice

If you’re not familiar with the process of creating digital avatars and cloning voices, we recommend reading these two articles:

• Digital Humans: A 2021 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Trend Explained
• How Voice Cloning Makes Dubbing and Localization Easier: The 3 Biggest Benefits for Studios

In short, AI systems use machine learning to create a target model of an actor’s appearance and voice to generate an unlimited amount of customized content, as if the actor themself took part in this.

Here’s the flow for creating the Cadbury ad:

• Shahrukh Khan starred in the initial videos for all four ad categories.
• Next, the AI system started analyzing his facial expressions to develop its precise model and re-create the actor’s double.
• At the same time, Respeecher’s AI algorithm analyzes Khan’s voice and builds its target model.
• Then, local shop owners submit the names of their businesses.
• When the facial and voice cloning models were ready, we fed voiceovers of the local store names into the system, which then perfectly generated SRK’s cloned voice.
• The last step in production was to lip-sync the video with the new speech fragments.

The result was immaculate — thousands of customized ads went live as if Shahrukh Khan was representing every local store in person.

Wrapping up

It is difficult to overestimate the impact of this campaign. Thousands of local Indian sellers received advertisements from one of the most famous celebrities. This helped attract more shoppers to the small local stores most affected by the pandemic.

In turn, this story turned the advertising world upside down. This was perhaps the first time the market experienced such widespread use of customized advertising messages. At the same time, the price and production schedule compared to the traditional approach were minuscule due to the use of AI technologies.

We encourage you to learn more about voice synthesis tech in advertising by reading 6 Challenges for Voicing Video Commercials and How to Fix Them With AI.

And if you feel ready to kick off your own new ads project where AI voice cloning would be a good fit, just let us know. Respeecher is always here to help.

This article was initially published on the Respeecher case studies page.