Will AI ever create another festive ad worth remembering?

Personalisation. If I had a rupee for every time I heard that word in the past three years of covering AI in marketing, I would probably have enough to fund a small AI campaign myself. And the refrain is always the same: "AI is an enabler."

I know it is. I use it every day, writing briefs, pulling research, even drafting emails. It's slipped into my routine so quietly that I barely notice it anymore. The same thing has happened across advertising agencies. Creatives use it to generate concepts. Planners use it to analyse data. Everyone's using AI for something. They are making personalised videos, creating content at scale, and adding humour through generative tools. CRED's recent AI-generated ads caught my attention. The brand managed to keep its trademark quirk intact even with a celebrity cast created through AI.

But here's the thing. When I sit down to think about AI in festive advertising, really think about it, my mind doesn't pull up a list of campaigns. It lands on one. Just one. From four years ago.

The Shah Rukh Khan 'My-Ad' campaign for Cadbury in Diwali 2021. Small shopkeepers could suddenly have Shah Rukh Khan promoting their stores by name. The technology inserted shop names and locations into videos of the actor speaking directly to potential customers. It felt like it mattered.

Since then, brands have been chasing that moment. Coca-Cola used OpenAI's DALL-E and GPT-4 models in 2023, allowing consumers to create personalised Diwali wish cards. Rebel Foods' Behrouz Biryani used AI in 2024 to offer customers personalised video messages from Saif Ali Khan with every order during Diwali. Burger King India invited customers to create personalised firecracker-inspired packaging using AI technology. Duroflex followed in 2025 with AI-generated Onam greetings from actress Amala Paul. Seagram's Royal Stag used regenerative AI and voice synthesis to let fans create personalised video greetings with cricketer Rohit Sharma. 

The pattern is clear: celebrity personalisation at scale has become the default playbook. Yet none have captured the cultural moment that Cadbury did. Will we ever see another AI campaign that resonates at a cultural level, or was My Ad a moment that can't be replicated?

The combination that made the ad work

What took the Cadbury campaign beyond technological novelty? Sudhir Das, Senior Executive Creative Director at Cheil India, points to a misunderstanding of the campaign itself. "The SRK piece was never truly AI-led. It used AI to execute a very moving and human message, on a scale that was not possible earlier," Das explains. "The people who talked about the AI were primarily A&M folks. Most people resonated much more strongly with the message."

The campaign succeeded because it brought together three elements that rarely align. Das notes that ‘Shah Rukh Khan My Ad’ was the first big, mainstream campaign in India that used AI, pointing to what psychologists call the Google Primacy Effect: the tendency to remember and favour the first example of something new. But novelty alone doesn't create cultural impact.

Raghav Bagai, Co-founder of SW Network, identifies what made it work. "The ad wasn't just a tech demo—it was deeply rooted in a real, festive insight: small local businesses struggling to gain attention during Diwali. Using Shah Rukh Khan's face—arguably India's most beloved icon—to give them a voice? That's powerful."

The campaign's success came from personalisation at scale, emotional insight, and cultural timing. It didn't use AI to show off technological prowess; it used technology to solve a problem. Small businesses lacked resources to compete with big brands during the festive rush. Cadbury handed them Shah Rukh Khan. The AI was invisible, but the emotion was front and centre.

Harikrishnan Pillai, CEO and Co-Founder of TheSmallBigIdea, puts it this way: "Let's be honest, it was an AI + Idea + Shah Rukh Khan moment and not just all AI. It was an important use case for contextuality, delivered by one of the most powerful ambassadors ever." 

He adds that the surprise factor played a role. At that point, most audiences and industry insiders hadn't thought such execution was possible.

The novelty problem: When tech becomes the story

Four years later, the situation has changed. AI platform-related searches in India reached 654 million in pre-festive 2025—a 2.6x jump from the previous year, according to a recent report. The technology has matured. Pinterest alone saw over 6,000 searches for "Pooja Invitation Card Backgrounds." YouTube Shorts featuring 'Gemini AI Photo Editing Garba/Dandiya' got 2.7 million views in 2025. Consumers aren't just receiving AI-powered campaigns; they are creating with AI tools themselves.

The GIPSI report, which studied consumer behaviour from September 2024 through September 2025, reveals that AI has become consumers' companions during the festive season. From curating looks to making purchase decisions, Indians are turning to AI tools for celebration planning. This shift means brands can no longer rely on the technology itself to create buzz.

Yet despite this growth in AI adoption, culturally resonant campaigns remain rare. The industry fell into what Bagai calls the "gimmick trap." 

"Everyone wanted to 'do something with AI' rather than solve a human problem with creativity powered by AI," he observes. The rush to the technology rather than the idea has resulted in forgettable executions.

Das confirms that in a “sea of AI-created work, a lot of it is not going as 'viral.'” According to him, AI-led campaigns that depend on the novelty of AI will no longer wow audiences, as AI-generated imagery is no longer new.

Bhawika Chhabra, Managing Director at Toaster INSEA, describes the shift in audience expectations. 

"With the deluge of AI-generated content filling our screens and minds, the novelty of AI has somewhat worn off, and audiences now want cultural relevance and emotional impact, not just clever tech tricks."

The numbers show this shift. According to estimates by plagiarism and fact-checking platform Originality.ai, more than 40% of Facebook’s long-form posts are now believed to be AI-generated—a figure that has risen sharply since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. 

Audiences are increasingly experiencing AI content fatigue, reports indicate, as the flood of predictable, overly polished AI-generated material is driving a renewed demand for authenticity, originality, and genuine human connection in communication.

While searches for 'AI Prompts' reached 1.6 million in pre-festive 2025, a 7.5x jump from the previous year, when your audience searches for AI prompts themselves, simply using AI is no longer impressive. The bar has risen.

Pillai draws a parallel to visual effects in cinema: "Think of it this way: when CGI first came to Bollywood, audiences gasped. Now, they only notice if it serves the story." 

AI in advertising has reached the same point. 

Tools have changed, but has the thinking?

The technical capabilities available to marketers today would have seemed impossible during the Cadbury campaign. Rajiv Dingra, Founder and CEO of ReBid, outlines the changes: "Since the Shah Rukh Khan–My-Ad campaign, AI has advanced from being a clever personalisation engine to becoming a full creative and analytical co-pilot. Today, generative AI can create video, voice, and imagery at scale, while agentic AI systems can unify data, automate workflows, and optimise in real time."

Bagai lists the tools delivering impact. Generative AI for personalisation like Rephrase.ai or Synthesia for video, OpenAI's tools for text and image customisation, Dynamic Creative Optimisation platforms enabling content variation based on real-time data, voice cloning and speech AI for localising campaigns in regional languages, and AI in media planning for predicting engagement patterns.

Yet Dingra identifies a gap. He notes, "Most brands are still scratching the surface using AI to tweak creative or personalise messaging. What's still untapped is the integration of AI into full-funnel storytelling: connecting ad creative to transaction data, using AI to predict cultural moments, and dynamically shaping campaigns in real time based on sentiment and consumer behaviour."

The infrastructure exists. Over 10 million Amazon users in India tried Rufus, Amazon's AI shopping assistant. Myntra's AI shopping assistant Maya makes users 3x more likely to purchase and helps them discover products across 16% more categories. The technology works. So why aren't brands creating culturally resonant campaigns?

Pillai points, "True personalisation at scale needs deep data pipelines, clean integrations, and brand guardrails. Most brands/markets aren't infra-ready." It's about having the organisational structure, data hygiene, and vision to deploy them.

Chhabra argues the problem runs deeper. 

"Too often, AI sits at the periphery as a stunt—to truly unlock its potential, it must be embedded across the funnel, from concepting to production." At Toaster, she notes, the agency’s AI Studio treats AI as a collaborator and production partner throughout the creative process, not just a finishing touch.

Das observes that the industry has reduced AI to solving everyday problems, mostly to cut down on execution time and to raise the quality of short-lived assets. But there is a need to decipher how one could use it to execute something they couldn't do earlier.

What it will take to create the next cultural moment

If ‘My Ad’ were a combination of factors coming together, can another such moment be created? The industry professionals believe it's possible, but only with changes in approach.

"The next campaign will come from an insight so strong that AI feels invisible," Pillai says. "Brands and agencies need to stop calling AI the magician and give due focus to the insight and the idea." 

He talks about keeping the fundamentals of advertising and brand building intact while using AI to make execution smarter, better, and faster.

Bagai identifies three requirements for the next campaign of this scale: "Creative leadership over tech obsession—the brief has to lead, not the tool. More collaboration between creative, data, and tech teams who are often working in silos. And risk appetite from brands."

The organisational challenge can't be ignored. Current processes haven't caught up with the technology's maturity. Dingra describes what the next culturally resonant AI campaign might look like. "The future benchmark won't just be 'an ad powered by AI' but an ecosystem where AI powers insight, creation, distribution, and optimisation seamlessly." 

He outlines three capabilities: real-time cultural intelligence that detects micro-trends instantly, hyper-personalised storytelling at scale that tailors narratives for millions of micro-audiences simultaneously, and closed-loop creative optimisation where AI measures impact through to sales and refines the next creative in real time.

Das believes that replicating the success of the ad needs “another perfect storm of many things,” stating that “we've done it once, there's no reason we can't do it again.” That storm would require either matching or beating its combination of resonant message, celebrity stature, and execution or creating a new combination with different elements.

Chhabra notes that the potential still exists. "Landmark campaigns happen at the intersection of a great idea and the right technology. Going forward, we cannot and should not expect AI to replace creativity, but to amplify it—to help bring bold ideas to life at scale."

The GIPSI report cautions brands to "HI-proof" their AI usage, with HI standing for Human Intelligence. Recent cases like Rado's ad being called out for stitching actors together using AI demonstrate the risks of putting technology before authenticity. As AI becomes mainstream, scrutiny over authenticity increases.

The path forward isn't about abandoning AI or scaling back experimentation. The challenge is redirecting the industry's energy from what AI can do to what stories need telling—and then using AI as the tool that makes those stories possible at scale.

Will there be another ‘Shah Rukh Khan My Ad’? The consensus suggests yes, but not through imitation. The next culturally resonant AI campaign won't come from celebrity personalisation 2.0. It will emerge when a brand identifies an insight as strong as helping small businesses compete during Diwali, pairs it with creative execution that feels natural rather than clever, and deploys AI so seamlessly that audiences don't talk about the technology; they talk about how the campaign made them feel.