Cadbury used an AI Shah Rukh Khan to advertise thousands of small shops

The case

Diwali is the biggest gifting season of the year for a chocolate brand in India, and in 2020 it arrived while lockdowns were hurting neighbourhood shops. Mondelez India's Cadbury Celebrations responded with a film it called "Not Just A Cadbury Ad", which handed part of its airtime to promoting local businesses. That first edition won two Cannes Lions in 2021. For Diwali 2021, Mondelez, Ogilvy India and the media agency Wavemaker made the idea far bigger. They brought in Shah Rukh Khan and, working with the Bengaluru start-up Rephrase.ai, used machine learning to recreate his face and voice so that he appeared to recommend individual local stores by name. Anil Viswanathan, Mondelez India's senior director of marketing, said at launch that the lockdowns had proved to be an ambush, especially for small businesses, and framed the work as part of the brand's "Iss Diwali Aap #KiseKhushKarenge" platform, which asks whom you will make happy this Diwali.

The mechanics were simple for the shopkeeper. A store owner, or a loyal customer, visited notjustacadburyad.com, chose a location, a business category and a store, and received a personalised video to share. Versions were served by pincode, so viewers saw shops near them. The campaign launched on 27 October 2021, according to LBB, featuring more than 2,000 stores across 500 pincodes, up from 250 pincodes in 2020. The decision on trial is whether a chocolate brand should spend its most valuable asset, a superstar's endorsement, on other people's businesses, through synthetic media, in a month when that superstar was at the centre of a national controversy.

The evidence

How the synthetic Shah Rukh was built

This was licensed synthetic media, not a hostile deepfake. Khan was the campaign's face, and the system was built from footage and voice recorded with him. Rephrase.ai's founders told afaqs that they created five separate avatars of the actor and worked from about 15 minutes of voice data recorded on set rather than in a soundproof studio. Because the films mix Hindi and English, the model also had to pronounce Hindi store names correctly inside English sentences. The coverage we reviewed did not describe how submitted store names were moderated, which is the obvious misuse risk in a tool that makes a celebrity say whatever is typed into a form. Rephrase.ai has also claimed that it built its voice cloning system in under two months, that output rose from about 1,000 personalised videos a day to almost 20 times that within two weeks, and that YouTube allowed the generated videos to run as ads for the first time. Those are the supplier's own claims, but they show how much of the idea depended on engineering at speed.

Launching in the middle of a storm

On 2 October 2021 the Narcotics Control Bureau raided a party on a cruise ship, and Khan's son Aryan was among those arrested. On 9 October, Business Standard, carrying an IANS report, said Byju's had halted all advertising featuring Khan after social media criticism. Cadbury launched anyway, and a #BoycottCadbury hashtag trended on Twitter from users who objected. Rephrase.ai's chief executive admitted to afaqs that the team had not completely blocked the controversy from their minds. Mondelez did not pull Khan, and the campaign ran through Diwali.

What the results claim

The results figures come almost entirely from parties to the work, and they do not agree with each other. Rephrase.ai, in a piece published by Adgully, claims more than 85,000 retailers used the technology, 105,000 people visited the site, over 139,000 ad versions were created and the ads drew more than 30 million views, with 22 percent higher view-through rates and 18 percent higher click-through rates. The WARC case summary, which is based on the awards entry, lists 130,000 unique videos, a 7.3 percent rise in consideration and a 35 percent sales uplift, without stating in its summary what that uplift was measured against. Ogilvy's 2023 release says the work helped over 200,000 small stores. The honest reading is that the store count ranges from about 2,000 featured at launch to hundreds of thousands claimed later, depending on who is counting and what counts as a participating store.

What the juries said

Industry recognition is the closest thing to independent assessment. At Cannes Lions in June 2022 the work, entered as "Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad", won a Titanium Lion, described as India's first, plus Gold in Creative Data and Direct, a Silver and a Bronze, according to Adgully. A year later it won the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix, a category that requires entrants to show results over time. Juries still rely on data the entrants submit, so these awards confirm peer judgement more than they audit the numbers.

The verdict

PASS. The idea solved a real problem for real people, it fitted Cadbury's long-running theme of generosity, and it used a new technology for something more useful than novelty. Pincode targeting made the generosity concrete: a viewer saw a shop they could walk to, not a generic message about supporting local business. Holding the line during the Aryan Khan controversy was a calculated risk that paid off.

The caveats matter. There is no independently audited figure for what the shops themselves sold, and the store counts vary by two orders of magnitude between sources. The campaign also normalised a celebrity saying words he never spoke. With consent and a brand behind it that is acceptable, but the public safeguards on what users could make the avatar say were never clearly documented. Brands copying the format today face a sharper deepfake debate than Cadbury did in 2021.

What Indian brands can take from it

• Give your media away when it fits the brand. Cadbury's ad space became a gift to shopkeepers, which matched a festival built on giving.
• Use AI to scale personalisation, not to fake intimacy. Licensed likeness, recorded source material and a clear purpose kept the work on the right side of the line.
• Make generosity local and specific. Pincode-level delivery turned a national campaign into thousands of neighbourhood ones.
• Agree one set of numbers. When the agency, the technology partner and the awards entry each quote different reach, the story weakens under scrutiny.

If you are exploring personalised video or synthetic media, our AI solutions team can help you build it with consent and controls in place. Our guide to generative AI content and brand safety covers the risks in more detail.