'As the saying goes, 'New technology is not good or evil in itself; it's all about how people choose to use it.'

So what if data-driven targeting and martech weren't just the latest weapons of modern marketers 'tracking' and 're-targeting' people like preys?

What if they were used for good? For magnifying positive impacts, making purpose local, specific, and personally actionable to all?

#NotJustACadburyAd combined brand purpose, creativity and martech innovation to reinvent gifting in 2020’s Covid-plagued Diwali season – uplifting 1,000s of local small businesses with +32% in sales during the celebrations that the pandemic had almost written off.

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, this exists to gain share from this demand with Diwali as its biggest opportunity.

But in a pandemic-struck year, how could Cadbury make Celebrations matter in a dull 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 its business.

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

job losses made people look out for themselves. Our brand purpose of ‘inspiring generosity’ was hopelessly out of sync with these times leaving no role for gifting in the environment.

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 realised there were many small shops and businesses that sold our products and were badly hit. Social distancing had increased online shopping and hit their sales.

We wanted to find a way to help them too while helping ourselves. So instead of encouraging people to buy celebrations to gift, we encouraged them to buy from small local shops.

We used our ad budgets and gave small businesses a platform where they had none, helping them survive these times.

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 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.

Achieved a 40% viewership (against benchmark of 5% in consumer product goods category) 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%. Giving 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%.