With technological advancements over the years, we have seen revolutionary shifts, be it from Radio to Television or Television to Digital. Now again, the world is slowly shifting its gears towards another possible revolution: Artificial Intelligence. With the ever-evolving market sentiments and the need to achieve multiple goals, in terms of performance from the brand campaigns, it is the dire need for brands to leverage technology which can further add efficiency & effectiveness to media strategies in real time. And that is where AI steps in with solutions for brands and marketers to automate customer experience.
Ashray Malhotra, CEO, Rephrase.ai explains, “The reason brand managers get attracted to this technology is because it enables them to communicate with every single customer on an one-on-one basis at scale. At the core, we at Rephrase.ai are building generative AI technology that helps us create personalized AI videos at scale.”
How Brands Are Using AI Today?
From tech-enabled chatbots to voice assistants to personalized targeting through AI videos, businesses across the globe are now adopting AI-based solutions for consumer engagement.
“A brand or performance marketer utilizes AI for several tasks be it product selection, budget management, audience management, KPI tracking, making creatives, automatic reports and insight generation,” elucidates Vaibhav Pandey, Co-founder & CTO, Vidtech.ai while adding that “Digital first approach, smaller teams and continuous fragmentation of marketing platforms and associated activities has led marketers to look at AI products with a more receptive lens than what it was in the past.”
One of the recent and most talked about AI-based campaigns was Mondelez’s ‘Not Just a Cadbury Ad’ campaign, which Rephrase.ai created using AI and machine learning to enable local store owners to create an advertisement for their own shops for free with celebrity Shah Rukh Khan.
Elaborating on the campaign, Malhotra says, “For the campaign, we made Shah Rukh speak for a few minutes and based on those few minutes of video footage, we were able to create a facial model of how Shah Rukh looks and a voice model of how he speaks. In the first leg, we were given close to 500 PIN codes, five store names in each, so a total of 2500 variables in some sense. And then we replaced his lip movements in those specific parts, to make him speak different store names. For the second leg, we partnered with another tech company to build the microsite, where anyone could go and search for the store name after which in the backend we get the name and create a video.”
Agency: Rephrase.ai
Brand: Cadbury (Mondelez)
Rephrase.ai developed a hyper-personalised ad-tech campaign for Diwali powered by Generative AI technology for Mondelez’s ‘Not Just a Cadbury Ad’. Using AI tools, Rephrase created hyper-localized ads for Cadbury Celebrations by creating a digital avatar of Shahrukh Khan - cloning him five times, each for one category. It enables the users/clients to use Rephrase’s voice model and AI tech to create professional and quality hyper personalized ads featuring SRK for any store they like. The campaign also empowered small businesses by allowing them to promote themselves through the creation of a platform where store owners across India, mapped through pin codes were able to generate an ad featuring Shahrukh Khan.
Recently, GroupM’s Outcome Media Specialist, Xaxis created a voice activated conversational ad campaign for Pizza Hut, which increased customer engagement for the brand by 8.29% over two weeks and led to a surge in order volumes. “Xaxis Creative Studios with the strength of Artificial Intelligence recently crafted a campaign for Pizza Hut in partnership with Mindshare wherein we changed the audio advertising selections from traditional broadcast methods to a conversational audio ad where consumers can talk back to the ad,” highlights Dimpy Yadav, General Manager - Xaxis India. She says that with conversational audio ads, there is an opportunity for brands to craft a targeted and personalized customer engagement strategy.
Sanjeev Menon – Co-founder & Head of Technology at Light Information Systems Pvt Ltd, a pioneer in Natural Language Processing AI says, “One of the largest telecom companies in the world is currently running campaigns using AI Analyst designed on the E42 platform. The AI analyst helps them study the campaign being run and the visitor engagement on their website. Also, their personal AI Assistant is tailored based on the visitor’s role and organization. This is a great example of broad scale analysis along with micro targeting using the power of AI. Using that the company was able to improve their win ratios by a great percentage.”
Agency: Rephrase.ai
Brand: Colors
Rephrase.ai and the TV channel Colors have created an AI driven digital campaign for the quiz show, The Big Picture. By cloning and creating a digital avatar of Ranveer Singh, Rephrase.ai facilitated Colors to create and send out large numbers of personalized video invites for its latest show. The invites had Ranveer Singh take the name of the user, inviting them to watch the show as well as call out the date of the launch. Almost a million such personalized invites were created and sent out in the first 72 hours!
Agency: CoRover
Brand: Asian Tobacco Company Limited, subsidiary of ITC
Asian Tobacco Company Limited (ATC), a subsidiary unit of ITC, through the help of their Ask ATC bot developed by CoRover, which have advanced machine learning, automation & artificial intelligence capabilities is helping their factory to reduce their machine downtime by more than 30% and improve operational efficiency. Voice-enabled vernacular language (Kannada, Tamil & Telugu) support in the noisiest industrial environment with greater accuracy is setting an example in this industrial automation field.
Rise in demand for AI based solutions post pandemic
The pandemic and the consequential lockdowns have made the job of a marketer even more important and complex now because of the rapidly changing consumer needs and demand. Explaining how Niraj Ruparel, Head of Mobile & Emerging Tech, GroupM India & Head of Voice, WPP India says, “During the onslaught of COVID-19, many people who were not even using bots suddenly started utilising it because they were pushed against the wall, sometimes to buy grocery and other essentials. Just as the usage goes up, AI peeks in. Interactions with more and more people makes it more familiar with the human ways. So right now, the focus is to supplement the retail experience through AI.”
“COVID-19 has changed how people shop, accelerating e-commerce adoption and market share,” points out Guru Hariharan, CEO of CommerceIQ, an agency which helps drive growth with e-commerce channel optimization. “Ecommerce is expected to make up 22% of global retail sales by 2023, up from 14% in 2019, and while consumers are starting to return to stores, the reality is that the world has changed and many of the shopping habits developed over the pandemic are here to stay. E-commerce will only continue to grow and for brands and marketers, this means building their online infrastructure, improving the shopping experience and innovating in how they capture the shopper at the moment of purchase. Traditional loyalty programs will not work anymore. Brands will need to ensure availability of product, good price and prominence on the digital shelf. AI based solutions can provide this,” he explains.
Agency: CoRover
Brand: IRCTC
CoRover created AskDisha ChatBot for IRCTC. It leverages conversational AI chatbot to reduce costs, achieve higher customer satisfaction and generate revenue. More than 150K passenger queries are solved daily with 90% accuracy. It led to 70% increase in CSAT due to instant response; greater than 85% of customers are happy with the services of AskDisha.
Brand: Whatsapp
WhatsApp launched conversational commerce to offer businesses a simple and personal way to showcase products & services to their customers without leaving the chat. Businesses can now share products in real-time, up to 30 items with multi-product messages or just one item with single product messages.
Benjamin Soubies - Managing Director, APAC & Japan, Talkwalker, a consumer intelligence platform says, “The pandemic has accelerated several trends -- such as the development of brand communities, the desire for brand inclusivity, and the emergence of new media consumption patterns, all of which place us firmly in the Age of the ‘Now’ Consumer. We see consumers firmly in the driver’s seat of opinion and brand perception today, whereby they want more personalized content, a faster service, and better experience. And they want it now.”
Talking about how brands can make the best of these changing expectations of the consumers Soubies explains, “Brands will need to recognize this overarching trend and its implications for their marketing and brand-building strategy in 2022 and beyond. In such a climate, where brands need to be live 24/7 and accessible to consumers through multiple channels, AI-enabled solutions are the way forward for brands looking to transform consumer data into actionable insight.”
Sanjeev Menon makes it clear that the demand for AI automation has been on a hyper drive since the pandemic started. “The technology also has been evolving at a fast clip pushing the envelope of possibilities further. Marketers are using AI based solutions to make sure that they are able to reach their target audience in the best way possible. We are living in an era where there is an information overload and to make sure that your offering is being looked at and considered by your target audience it becomes pertinent for marketers to adopt lean AI based solutions. These AI driven solutions have really taken marketing to a whole new level.”
Traditional Advertising Vs. AI Based Campaigns
With an infinitely large number of brands competing for user’s attention and loyalty - both of which are finite, brand managers are looking for new innovative marketing solutions that address the gaps & challenges in traditional marketing. Hence, AI-powered emerging marketing tools and technology platforms with their power to evaluate, understand and analyse the user behaviour in real-time fit the bill perfectly.
“With the returns on traditional media marketing going down, brands today are looking for solutions that go beyond the traditional metrics of CPM, CPC and all kinds of digital ad formats. The ‘Skip Ads’ phenomenon has become the bane of advertisers’ and marketers’ existence. Even if an ad does end up on a potential consumer’s screen, there are so many hidden factors that influence the effectiveness of it including whether the consumer is in a frame of mind (mood, intent) to act on the advertising cue. Hence the new-age marketing solutions need to take into account new emerging challenges of the evolving digital landscape along with user behaviour patterns and their preferences while at the same time leveraging the power of AI-based technologies to deliver on a brand’s expectation of higher user engagement, user retention & brand-recall,” reveals Disha Shah, VP Business, Conversational Tech Solutions, Bobble AI.
“The demand for AI-powered marketing solutions is driven not only by brand marketers but also by consumers. A recent SAP Insights report states that 73% of consumers find contextually relevant ads that are aligned with their intent on smartphones as enablers for them rather than intruders. At Bobble AI we are seeing a huge demand for our unique, innovative and highly targeted conversation media marketing, programmatic advertising and tech-driven natively integrated marketing solutions; all of which are backed by AI,” she further adds.
Agency: Xaxis Creative Studio
Brand: Pizza Hut
Xaxis Creative Studios with the strength of Artificial Intelligence recently crafted a campaign for Pizza Hut in partnership with Mindshare wherein they changed the audio advertising selections from traditional broadcast methods to a conversational audio ad where consumers can talk back to the ad. The voice activated conversational ad campaign for Pizza Hut India has increased customer engagement by 8.29% over two weeks and led to a surge in order volumes.
Atul Rai, Co-Founder & CEO of Staqu, an AI start-up says, “Traditional marketing was done with human assistance. For example, if you are an offline store and want insights on the customer preference, they are the ones already coming to your store. The camera has the answer on how to use that data and that device is the most powerful sensor, more like a human. But we are adding a brain to that eye and then using it to perform different kinds of marketing. So in traditional marketing there used to be a team to collect data, then further research was done on that data however with video analytics it is being identified directly through the camera. Organizations connecting data with sales makes sales data more powerful which was inefficient with traditional methods.”
“The contemporary advertising industry is a confluence of human and digital aspects. It is not viable to automate the entire advertising industry as a sizeable portion of the processes involves both manual and manual intervention,” states Pulkit Ahuja, CEO & Founder at Proxgy, an experiential discovery platform. “After all, the aim of any campaign is to extend an effective humanistic appeal to any form of brand communication. However some parts of the branding operation such as campaign creation, tracking and bidding can be automated to remove redundancies and save time as well as costs.”
Future of AI
With its personalized targeting, lower labour cost and multiple features that make consumer engagement easier, can Artificial Intelligence be the next big game changer?
“Our focus is largely to close the loop and build a payment gateway as part of the conversations. Now the Government has given a green signal to WhatsApp pay. So all possible payment integrations onto conversational AI is making this space all the more lucrative. Focus from our end is to make those conversations more human like so people could relate to it more and find it more relevant. And eventually it ends up increasing the consideration and eventually purchase intent. And you’re not taking them from one platform to another, you’re making an omnichannel service, then in there you will get them to interact and transact,” shares Ruparel.
Speaking about automation in advertising, he further shares, “Personally I don’t think the industry will move towards complete automation in terms of advertising. AI is not even remotely close to replacing or competing with the creative geniuses at some of our OpCos at WPP. But we are going to see AI aid the effectiveness of campaigns. Taking The world’s first HyperDCO campaign as the next phase of #NotJustACadburyAd with Shah Rukh Khan that’s taken the internet by storm as an example, the base video creatives and the ideation process will continue to be created by humans for many decades to come. But the effectiveness of campaigns will be taken up multiple notches by enabling personalisation of the content to every individual/business. This is how we see human talent and AI co-existing.”
Other brands using AI and innovations in the space
1. Vidtech.ai recently partnered with Tanishq as their new product experience management platform. It will take control and leverage the brand’s product data to drive visually rich experiences
2. Yellow.ai deployed chatbots to serve hospitals and NGOs working on COVID relief
3. CommerceIQ has worked with Kellogg’s, Nestle, Colgate-Palmolive and Spectrum Brands. They rely on CommerceIQ’s machine based commerce technology and business processes, which are purpose-built to tune e-commerce algorithms, collaborate and share data-driven insights in real-time in response to changing variables across hundreds of products on leading retail sites. CommerceIQ’s recent push was its entry into omnichannel with support for Instacart, Criteo, Amazon Fresh and Walmart, giving its customers the ability to manage all the e-commerce operations from one single portal.
4. One of the largest telecom companies in the world is currently running campaigns using AI Analyst designed on the E42 platform. The AI analyst helps them analyse the campaign being run and the visitor engagement on their website. Also, their personal AI Assistant is tailored based on the visitors’ role and organization.
5. Staqu has developed a product called Jarvis. For retail Jarvis is doing footfall & heat map analysis, gender analytics, premium customer identification, queue management, etc. In manufacturing, Jarvis is doing smart conveying, accident detection, fire detection, safety gear detection, and other use cases. So for safety and security, operational intelligence, and in all other possible tasks organizations are using AI.
Why Brands think AI is important
Anil Viswanathan
Vice President, Marketing, Mondelez India
“For marketers, there has never been a more exciting time. Technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented reality and machine learning have certainly unlocked new opportunities in marketing innovations and played a key role in making consumer engagement hyper-personalized and targeted. Not only bringing our existing audiences closer but igniting interest amongst newer ones and building scale. For us, at Mondelez India, by integrating AI with our brand purpose we have successfully moved the needle from ‘storytelling’ to ‘storydoing’. Be it our ‘Not Just a Cadbury Ad’ or Bournvita’s #GetTheMessage campaign, we have leveraged the might of AI in our campaigns to bring alive our brand purpose and the spirit of generosity in ways unimaginable.
When we first launched ‘Not Just a Cadbury Ad’ in 2020, the effort was to bring together creativity and technology to help small businesses who suffered a setback from the pandemic. Following the success and love it garnered, we were inspired to scale the impact of this effort and get more consumers to live our purpose. This brought to life the 2021 edition and our partnership with Rephrase.ai who helped us leverage the might of AI. The campaign reached +2000 retailers across 500 pin codes who created personalized ads for their stores using the AI-powered facial re-enactment tool. Over 120k personalized ads were created as a part of this campaign, and with it more than a million small acts of generosity.”
Deba Ghoshal
VP and Head of Marketing, Voltas
“Emphasis on Digital Marketing spends have continued to go up for the industry. This has also triggered innovation and use of technology in marketing, with several brands considering implementation of AI, machine learning and even meta-verse to achieve tangible results. The power of AI allows marketers an opportunity for better geo-targeting, with campaigns that are delivered at appropriate timings of the consumer decision making journey. AI has not only opened up avenues for hyper- personalized communication, but is also helping in accessing real time customer feedback, which helps marketers to re-engage with potential buyers effectively. We will continue to drive our omnichannel presence with a focus on being digital-first, and explore possibilities of integrating AI with our digital and electronic activations, to create instant, relevant and meaningful consumer experiences.”
Aparna Mahesh
Chief Marketing Officer, Great Learning
Customer engagement and retention are primary focus areas for any brand looking to build longer, stronger and more fruitful relationships with their consumers today. We have been using Artificial Intelligence-to build highly engaging and personalized content. We want Great Learning’ to be an integral and exciting part of daily conversations taking place between consumers over platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram etc. and are using an AI powered solution for the same. In fact, we’re looking to leverage AI to create personalized videos about our programs to engage with customers and prospects. AI has emerged as a powerful tool for brands to build differentiated and personalized solutions, at scale. By grasping advanced business intelligence, AI-driven automated tools can turn data from multiple, disparate sources into valuable insights.
Snehil Gautam
Head of Growth & Marketing, Housing.com, Makaan.com & Proptiger.com
“We believe in AI and its impact on consumer experience, that’s why we have a dedicated team for AI & ML projects. Application of AI on our platform starts from the listings getting uploaded on the platform. If a seller comes to our platform and uploads the listing, our backend engine, which is driven by AI to identify the right photos or rental amount, or right price or locality, it doesn’t let a fake property get uploaded. When a user comes to our platform, there is lots of logic that is built within it, so that he gets the property that he is looking for. So, the complete logic of recommending the properties to the user is run by AI & ML. Once the user goes away, re-engagement activities that we do are also driven by AI. So, the email, SMS, WhatsApp, or even the app notifications that the user gets, it’s driven by those AI engines to provide the best property to the users.”
Aarti Gill
Co-founder, Oziva
“I think when we use AI, it need not be a campaign, but it can become a part of our daily reach out to customers. For example, when we launched Oziva, we had a smart chatbot where people can ask their questions and they used to get product recommendations based on certain inputs that they have put. I think those are the different use cases of smart algorithms that can be used, right from product recommendations, discovery, personalized marketing can be done, which is the next leg. If you buy an Oziva product today, you can consult an expert. Those experts are helped by these smart algorithms, I would not use the word AI, I’m using Smart algorithm. The reason being is I think AI should be far more evolved. We use it a little bit in India, but it’s actual use cases must be much more important. I know these are the first level of smart algorithms that can be built. AI needs to be more evolved.”
