In 2021, voters in Punjab received an automated phone call from Delhi’s Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, in which he urged them to vote for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). AAP is widely claimed to have contacted millions of voters using this interactive voice response technology.

This use of automation in political campaigns, although not new, piqued voters’ interest. And while this personalised audio advertising may have achieved that successfully, it’s probably even more intriguing to speculate what may have entailed if Arvind Kejriwal himself had appeared on a voter’s smartphone screen and asked them to vote for the party—all the while addressing the voters with their names. Sounds like fiction? It’s not though; it’s personalised video marketing unfolding its wings in India.

Globally, personalised video marketing has been attempted by many brands—including the likes of Nike and Cadbury. However, they were not personalised to a degree that’d seem fictitious to imagine. For instance, this Cadbury GLOW advert enables users to add text to the video:

In another example, Marketo’s marketing invitation also makes the user feel significant by including its name.

However, these campaigns are not as personalised as certain recent advertisements in India have been; for example, the Cadbury advertisement featuring actor Shah Rukh Khan allows small company business owners to make original, highly personalised studio-quality advertisements. The advert employs Khan’s visage and voice in such a manner that it shows the actor saying the name of the local store or brand.

Just like everyone else, AIM was intrigued about this hyper personalisation and reached out to the man behind the cause—Ashray Malhotra. His company Rephrase.ai is behind the successful advertisement featuring the actor. Rephrase.ai claims to be a deep learning organisation that creates synthetic video content using AI.

Addressing the challenges they faced while working with this campaign, Ashray said, “The Shah Rukh Khan campaign was one of the most challenging ones that we had ever done at that point. And the Ogilvy team was extremely clear about the creative vision that they wanted—which was that they did not want Shah Rukh standing; they wanted him to have different poses in different places, and such. This meant that we had to develop five, totally digital clones of Shah Rukh Khan, rather than just one, as we had done previously.”

He further explained the complex intricacies of the task at hand: “ Furthermore, there were many more motions in the total project than we had previously dealt with. Overall, it generated AI issues in terms of video cloning—which was something we hadn’t worked with at the time. Also, each room we recorded was somewhat different, resulting in slightly varied sounds, reverberation, and so on. As a result, we had to construct numerous audio models of Shah Rukh Khan.”

Keeping out of controversy

Could personalised advertising avoid controversy now that it has been well-established that it has genuine potential to transform advertising in India? For example, in a recent AI-enabled Zomato advertisement, actor Hrithik Roshan referred to a temple as a restaurant—offending numerous viewers along with temple officials.

When advertisements are created using algorithms, it is highly likely that they will not be able to grasp human context with a much-needed accuracy. In the case of the aforementioned advertisement, the system had no way of knowing which restaurant’s name could cause trouble.

However, Ashray believes otherwise. He claims that much depends on data accuracy and ethics. Giving the example of his own company, Ashray said, “So far, we’ve worked with 50 firms and have had no controversies. One of the main reasons for this is that we strive for data accuracy at all stages of the process. To be clear, ethics is an important aspect of how we spend our time here at Rephrase.ai. From the screenplay to the files, to the edited videos, to the finalised clips—everything goes through multiple checkpoints.”

“I am really committed to ensuring that this technology just helps scale people’s time and does not assist in the creation of videos that you would not have chosen to produce in the first place. Because we recognise it as a really powerful technology, as the pioneers of this tech, we want to see it being utilised for good.”

Personalised Political Campaigns, the next big thing?

In olden times, politicians used to go house to house to collect votes. This practice helped them create a personal bond with their voters. Owing to the growing population and digitalisation, more and more campaigns are shifting to digital mediums. Now that India has witnessed multiple AI-enabled personalised adverts, could political campaigns turn to hyper personalised advertising too? 

It won’t be much of a problem for political parties to undergo such changes. Politicians like Naveen Patnaik are already experimenting with AR tech for campaigns like “Selfie with CM.” 

However, taking a step further, could it be possible for political parties to launch a campaign where voters receive an email or text message in which a politician is urging them to vote for their party by calling the voters by their names?

According to Ashray, it would be feasible. But, he also shared his concerns surrounding such usage of AI in the political realm: “Yes, it can be done. However, you have to take into consideration that while we may think that political parties creating personalised campaigns for their candidates is a wonderful idea, it can quickly backfire when they start building bad personalised campaigns of their opponents.”

“If a political party develops such a campaign for its rival party with evil intentions, things will become ugly. We at Rephrase.ai are not even remotely considering moving in that direction currently.”

Ashray also believes that a good use of this tech could be drive social causes; for instance, while talking about campaigns focused on environmental causes, he said: 

“If any of your viewers read this, and if they are either working with any NGO for education or any environmental reasons or tackling practically any social problem, we absolutely believe in the ability of customised films to help. I feel that this might aid in fundraising, which in turn might help these causes; I really want to double down on the space.”

Ashray concluded by encouraging readers to connect with him for collaboration on causes for social good: “So, please contact me; I’d love to work on it.”