Cadbury Celebrations' new campaign uses AI to make personalised birthday songs

The campaign allows the gifter to make their near and dear ones feel more loved by creating a customized #MyBirthdaySong, intricately woven with likings and shared memories of the giftee.

Cadbury Celebrations, India’s chocolate gifting brand, is redefining one of the most celebrated days across the world – Birthdays – by targeting the most fundamental aspect of the occasion: the ‘Happy Birthday’ song.

Conceptualised along with agency partners Ogilvy and Wavemaker, as well as technology partners Gan.ai and Uberduck, the campaign allows the gifter to make their near and dear ones feel more loved by creating a customized #MyBirthdaySong, intricately woven with likings and shared memories of the giftee.

Through the campaign, it aims to highlight how the jingle that’s the same in every language can now capture the uniqueness of the person being celebrated. To bring to life its unique vision of birthday celebrations, the brand introduced this new-to-market tech which uses four types of generative AI tools to ‘personalize b’day songs’, namely AI-generated lyrics, AI-composed music, AI generates vocals and real-time generation of personalized songs. 

To put this to action, it has created a microsite, a custom platform created by ADSMN Interactive Pvt Ltd for users to share information about what makes the person so special to them, such as nicknames, anecdotes, and prized memories.

The digital tool then creates custom birthday song lyrics embellished with these details. Users can also set the song to their preferred music genre, including options such as rap, hip-hop, and classical. They can also download it as a video with the lyrics playing in sync with the vocals in the video to make it easy for them to sing along thus, providing a new tech-enabled twist on an age-old tradition.

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Speaking on the announcement, Nitin Saini, Vice President, Marketing, Mondelez India, said, “In every culture, every language, the lyrics and tune of the 'Happy Birthday' song have remained pretty much the same since it was first published over 120 years ago. But each person is special in their own way and the celebrations on their special day should reflect that.

That is the core idea behind this campaign: making people feel more valued and cherished on their Birthday, which integrates with the brand’s proposition to make every occasion special. With #MyBirthdaySong, we are unlocking a whole new element of sharing and caring by giving a personal twist to a long-standing tradition. With this campaign, we aim to be at the heart of the tender and loving moments that people share with their friends and family. We are confident that our consumers will take to this novel way of elevating birthday celebrations and surprise those near and dear to them with a special song for their special day!”

Sukesh Nayak, Chief Creative Officer, Ogilvy India, said “At Mondelez and Ogilvy, we've always created experiences that delight our customers when exceptionally strong human insights collide with breakthrough technologies in the most unexpected ways. With Cadbury Celebrations, we saw an opportunity to make birthday gifting and celebrations more personalized and delightful. For a planet that's home to over 8+ billion people, each unique in their own way, isn't it just amazing that we have the same one birthday jingle celebrating them all?  

Building further on our generosity platform, we wanted to make Birthday gifting special, thoughtful and generous. We built a platform by engineering a transformative AI and machine-learning-aided technology that will help people create their own unique personalized ‘Happy Birthday' songs for their loved ones in real-time. That's maybe 8+ billion birthday songs, for a planet of 8+ billion people. We believe this delightful AI-enabled human idea will enable everyone to express how much their loved ones mean to them by making them feel truly special on their birthdays.”

Shekhar Banerjee, Chief Client Officer & Office Head – West, Wavemaker India added, “Birthdays are the biggest gifting occasions however, they are year-round, one to one and very personal. While Cadbury Celebrations is one of the most preferred gifts during festive occasions, the approach for birthdays had to be different. We anchored our solution to create a ‘thoughtful gifting experience’. With the help of tech and data, we focused on creating a seamless and exclusive gift that every giver and the recipient is proud of sharing.”

As a process, the entire song, including the vocals, is created by a unique generative AI solution created by Ogilvy Creative Tech & Innovation Team in partnership with Gan.ai & Uberduck Inc. Basis the answers shared by the user and the choices made, Uberduck’s Generative AI engine creates unique lyrics which are then sung by custom created vocal models by Gan.ai on the fly, and then mixed & mastered with AI-generated music by Uberduck’s proprietary AI remix technology for rap output. The end result is a unique #MyBirthdaySong.