“I don’t know the rules of grammar. If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language,” David Ogilvy once said. Cut to 2023, his agency which followed this mantra to the tee and is also named after him Ogilvy won India the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Lions for its campaign, Shah Rukh Khan My Ad for chocolate manufacturer Mondelez India under the sub-category market disruption in the category, Creative Effectiveness Lion.
The Brief
It all began in 2021 when the world was busy fighting for survival in the midst of the pandemic – Covid-19. By then most of us had lost either people close to us or knew of someone who has gone through a similar situation. Hence, it was a year of gloom and doom. In between in the second quarter, came the festive season, and this was where Mondelez India wanted to bring about a difference, which inadvertently would also solve a business problem. Gifting was the fastest-growing segment until the pandemic and Diwali gifting alone accounted for nearly 50% of Cadbury Celebrations’ annual revenue. However, the second wave brought challenges in the form of inflation, reduced opportunities, and lower pay. “In the backdrop of the Q2’21 Covid wave, there was a lot of uncertainty heading into the festive season that year. Chocolate Gifting needed to redefine its role to fit the context while positively impacting communities and bringing them together. With Cadbury Celebrations, we’ve always ensured that the brand’s purpose of inspiring generosity continues to shine across all its work. The uncertain festive season of 2021 provided the brand with an opportunity to create a real impact in people’s lives,” Nitin Saini, vice-president – Marketing, Mondelez India told BrandWagon Online.
To be sure, the fear of social contact accelerated the shift towards online shopping, making it more challenging for small retailers to run their businesses as they had no means to compete with e-commerce giants such as Amazon, Walmart owned Flipkart, among others. Even as Mondelez tried to scale up the sale of Celebrations through e-commerce availability, the company realised that it was not viable in terms of unit economics. As offline stores account for 95% of the sales, it was perhaps impossible to meet this number via e-tail. “We realised that devastating waves of the pandemic meant a crippling economy and sluggish revival of businesses. While large brands were slowly building back through sustained marketing and investments, smaller stores continued to suffer due to a lack of the same. With the help of our team at Ogilvy and Wavemaker, we decided to bring a sense of optimism to these stores by putting our purpose into action and supporting small businesses with #NotJustACadburyAd,” Saini explained.
The Challenge
For Ogilvy, there were two key challenges which needed to be overcome. Firstly, the aim was to overcome self-centeredness and lack of community spirit among people due to social
distancing which created barriers for mental availability. And second challenge needed the agency to overcome the reluctance of small shops to stock up because of demand apprehensions
which created barriers for physical availability. “In the very first year, we as a brand decided to give our platforms to small sellers. This was backed on the intrinsic purpose of generosity, rooted in Cadbury’s founding values to rescue it from the grip of a self-centeredness pandemic.
Our research showed us that when people helped each other, they felt more connected and
together. The shared adversity created an outpouring of empathy and generosity and unlocked an incredible sense of community. The brand stands for Kuch meetha ho jayee – matlab something sweet actually should happen and it did. We at Ogilvy, believe that platforms need to be build on rather than build away. We were very clear that one business idea has to help another business in this case small sellers. Diwali is the biggest business time for many people to make money. And even as things were that bleak, people needed help as every one was very cautious in their approach,” Sukesh Nayak, chief creative officer, Ogilvy, said.
The Approach…
As people gradually started to rebuild their businesses what they needed was little more than a nudge, that was generosity packed with empathy from the community. It is then Ogilvy along with Mondelez decided to handover its entire advertising budget and its celebrity brand ambassador to promote small businesses. “Every brand has a brand ambassador and what if our brand ambassador become the face for all brands. We took the idea in the same form to Mondelez, the client loved it too. But let me be very candid, we had no idea how would we do it,” Nayak added.
Yet Ogilvy along with Wavemaker executed the campaign, impeccably, needless to say with the help of actor Shah Rukh Khan. According to Nayak, the team meet Ashray Malhotra who was very keen on using his deepfake technology. And then came Shah Rukh Khan who took a plunge like a duck to the water. “By leveraging data, AI, machine learning, and geo-targeting, we made this possible.We created hyper-personalised SRK-My-Ads for every store – not a dozen, not hundreds but tens and thousands with SRK encouraging purchases from specific local stores that were in close vicinity of the user. Imagine how millions of Indians felt when Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) – the world’s biggest movie star asked them to shop at the store round the corner by its name. Imagine how small local store owners felt to have SRK be their brand ambassador,” Nayak quipped.
The agency created six stores across different verticals and the campaign covered more than 500 pincodes and was launched on YouTube and amplified on Meta’s platforms simultaneously. As both the agencies couldn’t cover all stores, hence a website NotJustACadburyAd.com was created. The website allowed users to create their own versions of the ad, for their business, or for a neighborhood store and share it on their WhatsApp groups and social media feeds.
Effectiveness aka The Impact
The result was out there to see! It outperformed YouTube benchmarks by 60% and Meta benchmarks by 90%. A total of 1,30,000 unique videos were generated by people of ‘SRK-My-Ad’ for individual retail stores. It scored 22% higher view-through-rate (VTR) than YouTube benchmarks. The campaign’s earned media was valued at $6 million through conversations across offline and online media platforms. One of the reasons for the campaign to record such is the fact that brand invested in the idea. It has been running for the last three years. According to Saini, in the first year of this campaign (2020), the company promoted small retailers through a strong technological intervention that hyper-localised its ad to promote small businesses across various pin codes in the country. However the Covid challenge continued in 2021 and several communities continued to witness friends and family suffer in one way or another, and the overall mood remained sombre. “While some businesses started recovering in 2021, the devastating second wave with its fresh lockdowns led to further disruptions and closures of more small businesses. With the context being the same across two years, we needed to dial up our efforts if we truly wanted to pull businesses out of this conundrum and create real impact! And we had to take it a notch higher this year, by making India’s largest brand ambassador, Shah Rukh Khan, the brand ambassador for each one of these small stores while hyper personalizing the ads,” he explained.
For the brand, the campaign resulted in 41% growth in distribution. Furthermore, Mondelez exceeded its target of retaining the 2019 business numbers especially at the traditional trade which was expected to shrink but instead recorded a 40% growth. Additionally, trials jumped from 58% in August to 61% in November. When compared in Diwali 2021 against Diwali 2019 (pre-pandemic), Celebrations sales were up by 35% and despite the second wave, sales against Diwali 2020 were up by 39%. The growth was 44% higher than the targeted 90% of 2019 Diwali sales.
PS: At a time when brands are being prudent in ad-spends this campaign is a prove that creativity eventually can drive sales and change brand perception. As David Ogilvy wrote in his Confessions of an Advertising Man, “What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.”