The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2025–2026
Centerfruit made its jingle a voice-AI game on feature phones and won an Abby Grand Prix
A GenAI voice calls rural feature phones and runs tongue-twister challenges in local dialects — no app, no internet, no smartphone.
Perfetti Van Melle India (Centerfruit)
The solution
Centerfruit's 'Kaisi Jeebh Laplapayee' — a jingle asking how a tongue can 'laplap' — was already a beloved piece of Indian advertising. But television reached millions while missing the rural pockets that matter to the candy brand: places in Uttar Pradesh with no data connection, no television and no digital services at all.
In June 2025 Perfetti Van Melle India, with WPP's Wavemaker, BharatGPT.ai and Google Cloud, turned that jingle into the 'Centerfruit Tongue Twister Challenge', a voice-based GenAI campaign. A hyper-local Voice AI calls users directly on their feature phones; a simple callback starts a real-time conversation in the caller's own dialect, with tongue-twisters and AI-generated responses.
Gemini scores pronunciation, speed and clarity live, so a phone call becomes a gamified brand experience with prizes, and BharatGPT's Ask Engine answers follow-up questions in local languages. The activation runs on Google Cloud with low-latency speech inference, built to handle concurrent users on basic handsets — no app to install, no internet required.
The campaign won the Technology Grand Prix at the 2026 Abby Awards for best use of voice service, recognised as an industry-first way to put two-way brand conversation inside the rural phone call itself.
Why it worked
- It removes every barrier at once — no internet, no app, no smartphone — and uses the one device rural India owns
- Reviving a beloved jingle gives the AI an instantly familiar cultural hook instead of inventing new brand language
- Real-time Gemini scoring makes the call a competitive game with prizes, so engagement is the product
- The same voice stack scales across dialects and regions, making the campaign a platform rather than a one-off ad
What can be applied
When your audience sits outside the digital ecosystem, don't build a better app — build on the channel they already own, and make the brand the game rather than the interruption.
Aftermath
After launching in rural Uttar Pradesh in June 2025, the Centerfruit Tongue Twister Challenge was held up as an industry-first example of voice AI crossing the digital divide, and it won the Technology Grand Prix at the Abby Awards 2026, part of a strong Goafest run for Perfetti Van Melle India. The voice infrastructure was built to scale across regions and languages, and the campaign's partners described it as a template for brands whose consumers live outside the internet. It became a frequently cited case study in Indian trade press for reaching the last mile without data.
Sources
- Centerfruit launches voice-based GenAI tongue twister challenge in collaboration with WPP, BharatGPT.ai, and Google Cloud
- Centerfruit unveils a voice based GenAI campaign
- Leo India, Mountain Dew and Centerfruit dominate ABBY Awards 2026 with Grand Prix wins
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.