How 2023 became the year of AI in advertising: Deepfakes, CGI, character creation, and more

In times when the debate around ‘Will AI take over my job?’ burgeoned to legit every nook and corner of the global landscape, the ad world in India embraced AI in an unprecedented way. Ad agencies not only experimented with Artificial Intelligence internally but also rolled out a slew of ad films that were actually AI-led.

In this story, BestMediaInfo.com enlists some of the many AI-led advertisements that on the back of Generative AI and sheer technology made their way into the headlines, quite prominently if we may say so.

As they say, first things first and we begin talking AI and tech, the one ad that is just unmissable for anyone working in the Indian ad world is the one executed by Ogilvy Mumbai and Wavemaker for Mondelez’s brand Cadbury Celebrations. In this campaign, Shah Rukh Khan takes on the role of brand ambassador for numerous local retail stores.

Mind you, it was the same SRK My Ad campaign which made Ogilvy Mumbai win the Grand Prix at Cannes Lions this year as well.

On that note, the other AI-generated ad which won at both Goafest 2023 and Cannes Lions, International Festival of Creativity in the same year alongside Ogilvy’s SRK My Ad campaign, was Airtel’s 175 Replayed.

Conceptualised by Leo Burnett, the ad campaign used immersive technology to recreate Kapil Dev’s famous ‘175 not out’ innings versus Zimbabwe during the 1983 Cricket World Cup which never made it to the screens due to the broadcasters’ strike that day.

Similar to Cadbury Celebration’s SRK My Ad, Zomato also rolled out a brand film titled ‘" target="_blank">Man Kiya, Zomato Kiya’ starring Hrithik Roshan which referenced food items from popular local stores of the city. But alas, not all that glitters is gold and therefore while the ad caught eyeballs, it also amassed severe backlash which left the company with no choice but to issue an apology and retract the campaign.

But the ad industry’s tryst with AI just doesn’t seem to end with Deepfakes. This year, a lot many brands such as Seagram’s Royal Stag Packaged Drinking Water and Sunfeast Dark Fantasy just didn’t use AI to up the ante by leveraging tech and AI to change the name of stores in ads, instead, they enabled consumers to feature alongside their favourite Bollywood celebs themselves.

Not to forget the latest Asian Paints’ ‘Mera Wala Mood’ campaign wherein an individual upon scanning his/her face and based on the expressions and mood, reveals a specific colour associated with their emotion, along with a personalised film that represents the person’s mood.

Similarly, many brands in addition to the automobile segment began leveraging Computer Generated Imagery for ad purposes and the trend existed not just in India but across the globe with Maybelline New York and Loreal being the early adopters.

In India, the companies which jumped onto the CGI bandwagon this year include WhatsApp, Uniqlo, Fae Beauty, Pulse and Baskin Robbins amongst others.

Apart from this, brands also rolled out ad campaigns which featured AI characters like the one in Bharat Matrimony’s brand film for Valentine’s Day and Bot Hard for MTV Hustle 2.0 amongst various others.

In fact, brands like Wakefit also leveraged AI to give the audience a glimpse of the childhood of its brand ambassador as well.

With much being said, it is pretty evident that AI has seeped into the Indian adland in not just internal processes but also in the final ad campaigns that see the light of day. But even so, there’s a lot more pathway still left to cover to experiment with AI until it reaches its full potential.

In an open-ended discussion with BestMediaInfo.com, several people from the advertising fraternity mentioned that what’s happened to Indian adland’s tryst with AI in 2023 is just the tip of the iceberg.

Some also condemned what is called an AI-led ad as childish and PR material for brands and agencies alike, because most of the campaigns only had an AI element to it for the sake of it.

On the contrary, some of the agencies in the country emphasised using GenAI for ad creation to such an extent that they have made its usage a criterion for the annual evaluation of their employees, while some have even set up separate AI studios and not just made AI a part of their existing verticals and processes.

All things assured the one fact that remains unbeaten is that AI has been picking up heat in the ad galores, and the fraternity is conscious and wary of the ill effects associated with its usage. Some of these include anomalies in copyrights, quality concerns, bias in algorithms and even possible plagiarism in the pursuit of increased productivity at the workplace.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com