CadburyMy Cadbury Era

Building on the huge milestone of the Yours For 200 Years campaign created by VCCP, which celebrates Cadbury’s 200th anniversary and its long-standing relationship with the British public.

How might we get real people involved and truly feeling part of what makes this brand a national treasure. A brand so many people have had in their lives since childhood. Could we get people to feature in the world of Cadbury somehow?

Could any emerging technology power an experience that allows the brand to really connect with people in an entertaining and participatory way? What latest technology might be suitable?

It would be remiss to not wonder if Gen-Ai could help and play a part in celebrating such an iconic moment in for a brand? But can we trust it enough? Can it be inclusive of everyone? The challenge with generating any imagery using AI currently  is that unfortunately, in this early stage of the technology development most AI models are inherently biassed and not inclusive because they haven’t been trained using a diverse data set.  Can we overcome this? That was real challenge.

Occasionally there is a moment in time you get to take on a project that is so exciting and groundbreaking you can’t quite believe the client has gone for it. A project that allows you to take some risks and flex all your experience muscles. The creation of the My Cadbury Era tool ticked all those boxes and pushed our collective experience both in technology and inclusive design to new levels. 

At its heart the My Cadbury Era tool allows users to upload a selfie and select their Era from one of seven classic Cadbury ads. This is not just a simple selfie upload though, the tool provides users with the options to determine how they would like to be represented - from skin tone, to gender -  Gen-Ai is well reported to have creative challenges in this area due to the repository of information it draws from and trains itself with from the open web.

But this was not just a technical endeavour, this was a creative one. It’s too easy to say an idea can be AI powered these days and just let the AI do something. When in reality Gen-AI is unpredictable when left on its own to be creative. So it took a lot of creative thinking, to train and prompt and manipulate old, not particularly diverse or inclusive posters, that in some instances were surreal or culturally dated. We had to get AI to understand the posters, D&I generally, and integrate all this to be something everyone can use, and enjoy the output.

With the help of a lot of clever AI and other technology - the tool recreates a poster featuring a user's likeness and essence of their features and bring it together with gen-ai prompt driven reimagined versions of the characters in this vintage posters . This was a chance for us to bring the historic archives up to date and show the diversity of Britain. Here’s where things got really interesting and the critical combination of people powered human design and AI technology crossed over to become a collaboration - people and machines creating together. A project of this nature needs a careful blend of both to ensure the integrity, and sensibilities of the content as an output in today's culture. And the experience needed to be enjoyable to everyone - accessible, open and transparent - as you would hope for users, given the significant positive change and D&I globally, and given this is from Cadbury - one of the UKs best recognized and loved brands.  A team of full time technologists, designers and DE&I specialists worked together with the the Cadbury team every step of the way. 

The selfie taking feature of the app was a bespoke build to ensure the best possible quality images for the poster generation. Some of the checks we put in place include ensuring the head is in the right position, the lighting is suitable and that all features can be seen and recognized, and the background influences that AI might pick up on, reduced.

Behind the scenes there was even more to consider. The inputs and training of the tool provided a broad user section representation and every iteration was tested on a selection of images as broad and inclusive as Cadbury customers.  Users have to identify themselves with SMS authentication to be able to use the tool but data is not kept for marketing purposes.

For the end product we enforced 2 levels of moderations, automatic based on pre-defined criteria and manual through a moderation partner ensuring that every image created was thoroughly checked for security and integrity of the campaign and its participants.

In keeping with Cadbury brand positioning of generosity, participants were automatically entered into a prize draw to win £200. Once the users have their poster there are prominent sharing tools that allow them to share it with friends and family and encourage them to create posters of their own, and share the love.

We created a free tool to let people place themselves at the heart of Cadbury history going back in time across key eras and themes of the brand’s iconic advertising archive.

This work shows that taking responsibility of AI like we’ve outlined is hopefully not only inspiring and inclusive, overcome the current pitfalls of AI. But in turn it is setting the direction of a positive and bright future for a proper way to wort with AI - a true collaboration between humans and machines to make wonderful experiences for people.

There was a significant impact to the Mondelez business, not just us, on how to design and build with AI. And not just for the campaign or product sales - this wasn’t about that. The journey we went on with the client due to the legal issues, and ethical challenges not only informed but is now influencing how Mondelez considers AI and the reuse of it’s marketing archives for the future - a better future using AI responsibility.