Cadbury invites consumers to star in vintage ads in AI push

Cadbury has launched a generative AI-powered marketing campaign that sees customers’ faces star in vintage ads from the chocolate brand’s 200-year history.

Users upload a selfie and select one of seven ‘eras’ of ads in which to star. They can choose from a number of options on “how they would like to be represented” – such as their skin tone and choice of masculine, feminine or gender neutral appearance – before the tool “recreates the image featuring their likeness”.

The campaign – created with the brand’s long-running partner agency VCCP – is being supported by a social and out-of-home advertising drive. Cadbury has also partnered with influencers to help demonstrate how the tool works and share their posters.

“It’s a product of human design and creativity which was boosted by gen-AI technology to make something that wasn’t previously possible – using cutting-edge techniques to bring something from the archives up to date and into a modern environment,” said Jonny Goodall, chief design officer at the digital experience agency that helped create the campaign, Bernadette.

Once uploaded, the poster is a generated using generative AI model Stable Diffusion and approved by human moderators before being emailed to participants to “let people place themselves at the heart of Cadbury history”.

User photos within the first 499,000 images submitted that pass the moderation process are also entered into a £200 prize draw, which the brand said was “in keeping with Cadbury generosity”.

The campaign follows another anniversary marketing competition from Cadbury last year, in which customers were asked to send family photos featuring an identifiable Cadbury product from before the year 2000, for the chance to win £1,000.

“We started off our 200 years celebrations by asking the public to go into their family albums and share photographs of themselves with Cadbury over the years,” said Phil Warfield, marketing director at Cadbury. “Now we are inviting the public to be a part of our posters, developing a tool that celebrates not only the rich heritage of Cadbury but also our relationship with the public.”

Cadbury is not the first fmcg brand to invite users to play with gen AI-based tools. Last year, Coca-Cola built an online platform – called Create Real Magic – which combines the capabilities of generative AI engines GPT-4, which produces human-like text from search engine queries, and DALL-E, which produces images based on text.

On launch it gave artists and consumers access to dozens of “creative assets from the brand’s archives” on which to base the works, among them the distinctive contour bottle and Spencerian script logo, and the Coca-Cola Santa Claus and polar bear. Ahead of Christmas it launched a gen AI ‘holiday card generator’ on the platform in more than 40 markets globally.

“We’re connecting people as we have always done during the holiday season, but in a uniquely real and magical way by democratising our creative assets and the latest AI tools,” said Pratik Thakar, Coca‑Cola’s global head of generative AI at the time.