This case shows how the correct use of media can do good for business and society effectively.

It captures how Cadbury’s purpose of generosity brought to life through a first-of-its-kind use of AI to create hundreds of versions of the same ad to encourage consumers to buy locally. This grew business during Diwali not just for Cadbury but also for thousands of small local retailers.

#NotJustACadburyAd combined brand purpose, creativity, and martech innovation to reinvent gifting in 2020’s Covid-plagued Diwali season – uplifting 1,000s of local businesses, and increasing sales by 32% in a pandemic-hit year.

Cadbury Celebrations brand is a festive chocolate box from Cadbury in India. But unlike chocolates, selling a gift box of chocolates isn’t the same. As gifting is a limited window opportunity and thrives on the seasonal demand, we exist to gain share from this gifting demand with Diwali as its biggest opportunity.

But in a pandemic-struck year, how could Cadbury make Celebrations matter during Diwali and prevent its seasonal gifting business from tanking?

Chocolate being 'non-essential' had hit rock bottom during the pandemic. Cadbury was fighting a herculean recovery task from a -50% decline.

Consumer sentiment was at its lowest weeks before Diwali due to fall in household income and even the trade sentiment was at its all-time low.

Given the situation, the objective to get people to think of gifting when they didn’t even want to celebrate.

And while doing so, finding a way to salvage our business.

The pandemic had isolated and distanced people. Lockdown shortage, pay-cuts,

job losses made people look out for themselves. The economic slowdown left no role for gifting in the festival season.

Consumer research, however, also showed that the pandemic had made many people aware of how much they missed connecting with others. Their own suffering had made them more empathetic. We used this insight to help the small businesses that were suffering while salvaging our own targets.

We used our ad budgets and gave small businesses a platform where they had none, helping them survive these times. We created #NotJustACadburyAd, a generous ad that featured local stores that changed according to the viewer's pin-code, encouraging them to buy from these local businesses that were otherwise suffering.

For our communication to matter, we had to get people to care about these small businesses. A generic message asking people to support them may yield some result, but we worried it might not be enough.

To evoke empathy and inspire action we would need to personalise the campaign.

Show them who in their neighborhood they could help by doing their Diwali shopping from.

Making our idea actionable took more than one could imagine. First, it had to work as a stand-alone Diwali ad. Then it needed us to show a variety of gifts being shared and not just Cadbury Celebrations. Lastly, it had to tag the names of local shops from where these gifts have been sourced. And, most importantly, it needed to show names of local shops of that catchment area where it got served. All of this needed to happen automatically, smoothly, and at scale.

We mobilized on-ground sales teams to onboard 7-8 small shop owners in each postal code. We then ran a few pilots to check the responsiveness of the AI-enabled ad on YouTube. Using postal code-based data, we custom-designed different versions of the same ad which was geo-targeted across 260+ pin codes. Our viewers based on their location and their postal codes saw a version of our Diwali ad which featured the names of the stores around them. We could do this by building a bank of the stores across 260+ postal codes and an algorithm that custom created a specific ad for each viewer.

We seeded the ad along with the explainer video through the dark social to trigger a chain reaction to compliment the hyper-targeting reach through YouTube and Facebook.

We continued to reach out to the larger universe with a generic edit to give scale to the category.

Achieved a 40% View Through Rate (benchmark of 5%) on Facebook and YouTube a showcase of how many people saw our ad.

Earned an overwhelming $1.5 million worth of free PR as the case video was shared across dark social. Adding to it, engagement soared and spread even more as influential voices organically supported the gesture.

More stores, more boxes.

We added 16000 more stores in traditional trade. Additionally, stocking of our boxes per store increased by 26%. This addition alone gave us an incremental seasonal sale of USD 3.6 million.

Against an estimated fall of 30%, we recorded a 2.2% growth. That meant an uplift of 32.2%. The highest surge of sales in our history.

Small shops that contributed 60% to our total Diwali sales increased by 14%. Taking share from small shops to 74%.

Additionally, even E-comm grew 100%; from 4% business share to 8%.

We put together an unlikely combination of writers, platform partners and data collators to bring the idea to life. An animatic was tested across platforms like YouTube and Facebook to check for geo-location-based dynamic creative optimization while the on-ground team collated pin-code-wise retailer data.

The ad was optimized as per location, any viewer would see the small local shops around his area in the ad.

Post testing we produced our ad or rather ads with several hundred combinations of retailer data fused with AI and initiated the activity in phases. Continued scaling up by adding more retailer data across the country. As more people saw the ad, we expanded to more cities.

Two weeks before Diwali we also added an explainer video and a microsite in the campaign mix to show the astonishing use of AI in enabling this gesture of generosity towards the struggling businesses.