Cadbury made Shah Rukh Khan advertise thousands of local shops, by pin code

Diwali gifting is Cadbury Celebrations' peak season in India, but the product is bought overwhelmingly in small neighbourhood stores — the same stores the 2020 pandemic hit hardest. A conventional response would have been a bigger celebrity film. Instead, Ogilvy India and Wavemaker asked how one celebrity budget could work for thousands of individual shops at once.

For Diwali 2020 the team built an advertising platform where the store names inside the ad changed according to the pin code in which it was viewed, using retailer data Cadbury's field force collected at postcode level. In 2021 they went further: with AI startup Rephrase.ai, machine learning recreated Shah Rukh Khan's face and voice so India's biggest actor appeared to personally endorse each local store, and shop owners could generate their own version of the ad by filling in a short form.

The viewer experience was uncanny: India's biggest star telling you to buy Diwali chocolate at your own corner shop, by name. The shopkeeper got a celebrity endorsement no small business could ever afford; Cadbury got the gratitude and shelf effort of the entire trade channel it depends on.

The campaign won India its first Cannes Titanium Lion in 2022 and was widely credited with lifting both brand warmth and retailer relationships through the pandemic Diwalis.

One star, thousands of store-name ad variants, served by pin code

The brand's real customers at Diwali are small shops, so spending the celebrity budget on the shops attacked the actual bottleneck.

Pin-code retailer data from the field force already existed; the creative idea made it usable in media.

AI face/voice regeneration collapsed the cost of personalization — thousands of ad variants from one shoot.

Letting shop owners generate their own versions turned a media buy into a self-serve tool.

When your distribution network is thousands of small shops, the most valuable thing a national brand can advertise is the shop itself — brand goodwill and retailer push compound each other.

The 2021 edition, 'Shah Rukh Khan-My-Ad', became one of India's most awarded campaigns, winning the country's first Cannes Titanium Lion in 2022. Mondelez repeated the playbook in later Diwalis, and Rephrase.ai — the startup behind the face-and-voice synthesis — was acquired by Adobe in 2023.