MAM
TTT and Hershey India launch AI website for personalised Valentine’s dedications!
Mumbai: Terribly Tiny Tales (TTT) has consistently woven heartwarming tales around the threads of love and cherished connections, striking a chord with its audience. TTT’s flagship IP, ‘Butterflies’ (that captures love in various dynamics) and Valentine’s have been synonymous for years now, with colossal success and in collaboration with Hershey India for the last two seasons. This year for its much-anticipated 5th season, ‘Butterflies’ powered by Hershey India is set to scale new heights to usher in Valentine’s Day 2024 while retaining the original core of the IP. In a significant stride towards innovation and infusing a special touch into the campaign, TTT is not only expanding its creative prowess but also venturing into the tech domain by launching a custom dedication website for #YourForevers which will be live till February ‘24. With this distinct, cutting-edge portal fueled by Generative AI, TTT empowers users to craft customized SMS messages for their loved ones – adding a layer of sentiment to their storytelling. This strategic move positions TTT at the intersection of content and technology, reaffirming its commitment to pushing boundaries and delivering unique experiences to its audience.
This season, with the help of this brand-new generative AI-focused website, TTT ‘helps you voice for every relationship of your choice’. The platform aims to create tailored dedications, celebrating all kinds of love this Valentine’s – be it the enduring love between friends and couples, the cherished family bonds the nuanced dynamics of sibling relationships or any other forms of connection. The AI process seamlessly integrates user inputs, generating personalized dedications with custom images and songs in a classic retro style, thus delivering a tailored mixed tape that captures both present love and futuristic storytelling in mere seconds.
For example, consider a scenario where a friend desires to convey the essence of their bond. The user inputs all the key details into the generative AI platform about their friendship – shared experiences, defining moments, and the emotions he/she wishes to express. The AI weaves this data into a heartfelt poem, incorporates a customized image that resonates with the message and sets it all to a selected song that holds a special meaning. This unique creation, celebrating their friendship is then delivered directly to the recipient’s inbox.
The entire campaign caters to a diverse audience of all age groups and revolves around the simple concept that being romantic at heart doesn’t always translate to romantic actions, and TTT addresses this challenge at scale, maintaining a personalized touch at the same time. While creative storytelling remains at TTT’s core, the brand is adopting fresh, modern formats to narrate familiar tales in 2024. Moreover, top dedications on the platform will stand a chance of becoming a film in Butterflies S5.
TTT founder and CEO Anuj Gosalia said, “With the world moving towards generative AI, we have stitched real love and Artificial Intelligence together by building the country’s largest dedication portal to help you express your love this Valentine’s. Personalization is a powerful tool for making consumers feel valued and understood. We have been working on this project since November ‘23 and, as we launch this website just ahead of the romantic season, we invite you to join us in the art of personalized storytelling. Also, stay tuned for the upcoming 5th season of ‘Butterflies,’ our flagship web series in collaboration with Hershey India – capturing diverse love dynamics with its rich storytelling which has always kept the audience enraptured. We’ve pulled out all the stops to make this season bigger and better.”
Hershey India marketing director Ankit Desai said, “Valentine’s Day is a celebration of love in its myriad expressions, from the profound connection between spouses to the bittersweet relationship between siblings, and the everlasting ties shared with parents. Over the past three years, we have been building and strengthening the ethos of our campaign ‘YourForevers’. To bring alive this, we are thrilled to yet again associate with Terribly Tiny Tales for the upcoming season of ‘Butterflies’. As we eagerly anticipate the romantic tales and heartfelt content that will surely strike a chord with the viewers, we are equally excited about TTT’s launch of their Generative AI portal that adds another dimension to the campaign. Embodying innovation at its core, this portal is a canvas for heartfelt messages, elevating the art of expressing love in the digital age. Our strategy seamlessly integrates creativity, strategic execution and cutting-edge technology, enabling heartfelt connections across diverse relationships. Through the AI portal, we want to enable consumers to express love to their forevers while providing a truly personalized and meaningful experience.”
Strategically slated for a pre-Valentine’s Day launch, the website launch campaign will leverage social media platforms for widespread promotion. Additionally, TTT will be collaborating with multiple influencers, who will use the portal to dedicate original songs and express how they feel. The brand is eyeing to generate 10K + submissions through the portal and maintaining a dynamic buzz around the campaign. So, unleash the power of personalized storytelling, create unique dedications, and make this Valentine’s Day unforgettable for your loved ones. Just like love has no limits, so does the portal! Feel free to utilize it as many times as you want to.
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.
