Digital
Ravi Shastri shines in Britannia’s industry-first AI campaign
Mumbai: Britannia on its way to revolutionize the way of connecting with the audiences by seamlessly integrating AI technology, introduced another campaign with cricketing legend Ravi Shastri. Britannia 50-50 Golmaal presents an innovative approach that allows users to engage with the cricket legend Ravi Shastri during the ongoing cricket season and receive Golmaal advice through personalized video responses. Embarking on an innovative journey, Britannia is ushering in a new era of audience connection reflecting the brand’s unwavering dedication to continuous innovation, all with a singular aim: to deliver unparalleled and unforgettable experiences to our cherished consumers.
In collaboration with Mindshare India, Britannia brings together India’s passion for the sport with Ravi Shastri’s expertise offering witty and amusing responses to fans’ quirky questions. The core of this campaign is the brand’s commitment to celebrating its enduring connection with cricket and extending to the audience a heartfelt invitation to unleash their inner curiosity. With this the brand offers consumers an exciting platform to ask cricket-related questions to the legend, eventually elevating the personalization experience. By immersing the audience in the context of cricket during the peak of this cricket season’s fervor, Ravi Shastri’s digital avatar comes to life, fulfilling fans’ desires to hear from a cricketing legend in an entirely novel way.
Britannia has consistently harnessed the power of AI to create exceptional consumer experiences. On World Biscuit Day, Britannia embarked on a journey to transport audiences in the magical world of Britannia biscuits with the power of cutting-edge Generative AI and meticulous design to bring to life a fantasy land filled with Jim Jams, Bourbons, and other Britannia biscuits. In a similar vein, on Independence Day, Britannia launched the ‘1947% More History’ campaign. This heartwarming initiative breathed life into the inspiring narratives of India’s few remaining freedom fighters. Through an Augmented Reality (AR) experience triggered by Britannia products found in households across the nation, the campaign film utilized generative AI technology to vividly depict the freedom movement’s historical visuals and recreate the youthful profiles of these heroic figures who shared their own stories.
The new Golmaal AI chatbot campaign also distinguishes itself through its unique capability to generate fully AI-powered text-to-video responses of Ravi Shastri for user queries. This campaign represents a significant milestone in Indian advertising, as it seamlessly combines ChatGPT4 with a Text-to-Video engine, marking a novel approach where a consumer-facing marketing campaign provides AI-powered video responses from a celebrity for the first time. The campaign’s innovative team delicately crafted and trained a digital avatar of Ravi Shastri, allowing it to create automated videos based on text input, complete with voice and facial expression modulation offering a fun and personalized way for consumers to connect with the digital avatar of Ravi Shastri.
Commenting on the campaign, Britannia CMO Amit Doshi said “Britannia’s commitment is to embrace new horizons and provide valuable experiences that resonate deeply with our audience. A mission that has been exemplified through our integration of AI across diverse campaigns, ensuring that consumers continue to enjoy innovative and unforgettable experiences. Bringing alive this vision of innovative user engagement, we are thrilled to launch Britannia 50-50 AI Chatbot. Britannia’s profound connection with cricket and its rich history is woven into the fabric of our brand. This campaign is a celebration of our enduring dedication to the sport that unites the nation. This endeavor made possible through our strategic partnership with Mindshare India and the pioneering integration of AI technology, marks a remarkable journey towards forging an entirely novel connection with our valued consumers.
He further added ‘The involvement of the legendary cricket icon, Ravi Shastri, in Britannia 50-50 Golmaal adds an exhilarating dimension to the campaign. Ravi Shastri’s digital avatar, powered by AI, allows us to seamlessly engage with our consumers, offering them insights and entertainment in a manner previously unexplored. We hope to continue exploring the transformative power of AI across all our campaigns.”
Amin Lakhani, Chief Executive Officer, Mindshare South Asia, “In a world where AI is playing an important role across the marketing funnel, this campaign is truly a differentiated way of enhancing consumer experiences to drive brand growth.
What makes this really innovative, is the bringing together of technologies and partnerships to tell the Britannia story. The content expertise of Mindshare and the giant strengths of ChatGPT4 and ‘Text-to-Video Engine’ has made this campaign really enduring and not just a passing fad.”
Digital
GUEST COLUMN: How AI is restructuring distributor and retailer motivation models
From incentives to intelligence, AI is redefining how brands engage channel partners
MUMBAI: Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how brands engage with their most critical yet often overlooked stakeholders: distributors, retailers, and last-mile influencers. For Abhinav Jain, co-founder and CEO of Almonds Ai, this shift marks a fundamental departure from traditional, transaction-led incentive models toward behaviour-driven, data-intelligent ecosystems. In this piece, Jain examines how AI is enabling brands to decode partner motivations, predict engagement patterns, and deliver personalised, scalable experiences—ultimately redefining channel relationships from transactional exchanges to long-term growth partnerships.
Across many sectors, there is increasing recognition that motivating those who bring products to market (distributors, retailers, last-mile influencers) poses a growing challenge.
Brands continue to invest significant marketing and digital resources to consumers, yet in many countries and the vast majority of emerging economies, these types of consumer-focused investment areas have had little impact on ultimate product delivery. Rather, it is still the case that traditional retail continues to make up most products sold.
So why is it that the systems built around motivating these channels have yet to evolve?
For decades, distributor and retailer engagement revolved around static schemes – quarterly targets, volume-based rewards, and occasional trade promotions. These programs were designed around transactions, not behaviour. The assumption was simple: if incentives increase, performance will follow.
Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, the definition of performance is being challenged.
With the development of artificial intelligence, businesses can move beyond simply creating loyalty based on transactional-based models and toward models built on behaviours, the behaviours of channel partners that are intrinsic to their motivations in engaging with particular brands. As a result, the means by which businesses develop relationships within their distribution network are starting to evolve; thus, ultimately changing how brands interact with those within their distribution network.
Assessing engagement: Transitioning from transactional- to behavioural intelligence
Traditional loyalty systems refer to transactional activity (sales data). Although this data is valuable and important, it only provides a partial view of engagement across the channel partner.
For example, a retailer may have a high frequency of sales of a product, but their lack of engagement with the manufacturer would not reflect that they have true loyalty toward that brand. Conversely, a retailer who actively participates in training programmes, acts as brand advocates, and is engaged in learning with the supplier would exhibit more profound levels of loyalty but would have been invisible based on historical incentive programmes.
Artificial intelligence allows for the identification of behaviours that help to address this gap. Brands are able to use a variety of engagement data points, participate in learning programs, respond to communications, redeem behaviour and track platform use behaviour in order to identify motivation through behaviour.
McKinsey has stated that companies that leverage advanced analytics for their sales and distribution functions can achieve as much as a 15-20 per cent increase in productivity due to increased awareness of their behavioural trends throughout their networks.
This visibility of behavioural patterns within channel ecosystems can be transformational to brands as they can now view how partners engage on their path to purchasing products, instead of just measuring the sales revenue generated by those purchases.
Predicting motivations, not just measuring performance
Possibly, the largest contribution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to helping brands engage with partners via channel ecosystems is its ability to predict future engagement versus simply measuring past performance.
Traditionally, brands only realised that a partner was disengaged (not likely to purchase products) once their sales performance had already declined. By then, the brand would have to use significant amounts of incentives or aggressive promotional activities to recovery their partner’s engagement level.
AI models can help organisations to detect early signs that a partner is becoming disengaged, such as declining participation in learning modules, declining interaction via the platform, or slower reward redemption rates. These indicators can help organisations to proactively engage with their partners before their sales performance begins to decline.
The practical application of AI and predictive analytics gives brands the ability to re-engage with their partners prior to their sales performance declines. For example, instead of developing and implementing broad-reaching incentive programs that provide a “one size fits all” incentive to all partners in an ecosystem, brands are able to develop targeted, engaging re-engagement programmes. This is how personalisation can be done on a large scale, such as across global distribution and retail networks.
The vast majority of distributor and retailer channels have thousands, if not millions, of individual channel partners. Historically, providing personalisation to such a large number of businesses has not been feasible.
However, with the advent of AI, personalisation at scale is becoming a reality.
Brands can now create tailored engagement journeys for all their partners, based on their partner profiles, through some combination of machine learning models and behavioural segmentation. For example, high-performing distributors might receive higher levels of leadership-based recognition and greater incentives to continue to grow. Emerging retailers, on the other hand, might be supported with training, onboarding rewards, and measurable performance milestones.
The shift towards personalisation of partner engagement echoes the direction that consumer marketing is already moving towards.
According to Salesforce’s report, over 70 per cent of customers expect personalisation in the way that brands engage with them. As such, there is a growing expectation for B2B ecosystems to have these same types of expectations from their channel partners.
Gamification and continuous engagement
AI is also radically changing how brands will engage with their channel partners through the use of gamification.
Many traditional incentive-based contests and leaderboards would spark temporary engagement among their participants, but they struggled to sustain engagement over time. With the use of AI, gamification mechanics are evolving dynamically based on historical and evolving participation patterns by their channel partners.
Challenges, rewards, and recognition structures can be modified continuously in order to sustain engagement with all of a brand’s partner segments. This will provide a greater opportunity to move away from episodic campaigns towards ongoing, continuous engagement experiences.
When channel partners receive motivation as part of their daily business activities through recognition, learning, and tracking their performance, long-term loyalty will be achieved.
Aligning motivation to broader impact
There is a growing trend within the channel ecosystem to integrate sustainability and socially responsible behaviours into the channel partner programmes of brands.
Increasingly, brands are motivating their partners to use sustainable practices in their operations, participate in sustainable practices like sustainability-related knowledge programmes, or promote products that are in line with their sustainability objectives.
Brands can use AI to monitor and measure these types of behaviours and incorporate them into their incentive frameworks so that brands can align their commercial objectives with broader social and environmental outcomes.
A shift in the way brands view their channel partners
AI is having the most significant impact on the way that brands are now viewing their channel partners, as it relates to the underlying philosophy of those fundamental relationships.
For the past several decades, many brands have viewed their channel partners as intermediaries in the supply chain. More and more brands are now beginning to view their channel partners as key ‘partners-in-growth,’ and their actions can have a direct impact on market performance.
In fact, all the channel ecosystems are using behavioural engagement platforms to design new models that reward not just transactional behaviour, but also create continuous engagement journeys for their partners, where their partners can receive recognition for their participation, learning, and continued engagement, thereby reinforcing long-term loyalty to the brand.
The future: Intelligent channel ecosystems
As we consider what the next phase of channel engagement may look like, many believe that it will be based on intelligent ecosystems, using AI to continuously monitor and adjust the engagement strategies used to engage their channel partners, in real time and based on the behaviours of those partners.
For brands operating in complex distribution networks, the ability to perform well will be determined both by whether products are available to their customers, as well as by the enthusiasm, expertise, and loyalty shown from each channel partner that represents the brand each and every day that they are working on behalf of the brand.
While AI clearly does not eliminate the human aspect of a brand’s relationship with its channel partners, it does allow brands to better understand and nurture that relationship.
In markets where the last mile will determine whether a sale is made, how one leverages the intelligence gained by using AI will ultimately be the difference between gaining a new, sustainable competitive advantage versus losing one.
