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Clones, Avatars, voices of dead superstars rising, someone, you admire walking out of the screen and standing beside you – technology is disrupting the advertising, marketing and retailing experience. At the Creative Experience Centre in WPP’s swank campus in Delhi, you get an immersive feel of how artificial intelligence, augmented reality and more can supercharge brand campaigns.
Niraj Ruparel, the creative tech lead of WPP and GroupM India is a busy man as he walks through interested clients through what is possible now in the retailing and marketing sphere. So far, he says, he has done walk-throughs for 80-plus clients. “Sky is the limit now,” he says, as he shows how the mobile phone in the hand of the consumer can bring to life brand experiences and take interactivity to unthought of levels.
He shows an avatar of himself on the screen on the wall – he gazes at the mobile held in his hand and combs his hands through his hair, and the screen avatar does the same. He changes the avatar – imagine this is a celebrity’s avatar, he says. He winks and the screen avatar winks.
But all this is basic – technology can allow the consumer to project herself next to the celebrity avatar, or bring a brand product out of the screen next to where she is standing.
The evolution matrix of AI has shifted from pre-GPT to synthetic AI to multi-modal AI and we are now supercharging the whole retail and marketing experience, he says.
As a demo, he shows the innovative Britannia 50-50 T20 Golmaal with the Ravi Shastri campaign that played out during the cricket season. A digital avatar of Ravi Shastri was created that would keep answering questions of viewers in real-time with the quirkiest of answers.
Artificial intelligence allowed the creative teams to create 50,000 plus communications for different homes. The questions were prompt-engineered by a creative team. Even when someone broke into the prompt-engineered queries and posed a googly question (Shastri, looks like you have a new roommate, a mouse in your drawer, what would you do?), the AI-powered avatar of the cricketer did not miss a beat with a witty response of cleaning up the biscuit crumbs so as not to attract mice.
Ruparel predicts that influencer marketing will be disrupted by technology as influencers will find ways to create clones of themselves that can interact with their followers in real-time answering questions. “Now you have 5G, and with the speeds that 5 G provides, you will not be content with just video – it allows you to offer gamified experiences to customers,” Ruparel points. And AI gives you the power to personalise communication to many homes.