HOW WE DID IT

At its heart My Cadbury Era allows users to upload a selfie and select their Era from one of seven classic Cadbury ads. This is not just a simple selfie upload though, the tool provides users with the options to determine how they would like to be represented – from skin tone, to gender –  Gen-Ai is well reported to have creative challenges in this area due to the repository of information it draws from and trains itself with from the open web.

This was a technical and creative collaboration like no other. Gen-AI is unpredictable when left on its own to be “creative”. So it took a lot of creative and technical thinking, to train and prompt and manipulate old, not particularly diverse or inclusive posters, that in some instances were surreal or culturally dated. We had to get AI to understand the posters, DE&I generally, and integrate all this to be something everyone can use, and enjoy the output.

With the help of AI and other technology – the tool recreates a poster featuring a user’s likeness and essence of their features and brings it together with gen-ai prompt driven versions of the original characters in the vintage posters . This was a chance for us to bring the historic archives up to date and show the diversity of Britain. But this required a critical combination of people-powered human design and AI technology crossed over to become a collaboration – people and machines creating together. A project of this nature needs a careful blend of both to ensure the integrity, and sensibilities of the content as an output in today’s culture. And the experience needed to be enjoyable to everyone – accessible, open and transparent – as you would hope for users, given the significant positive change and D&I globally, and given this is from Cadbury – one of the UK’s best recognized and loved brands.  A team of full time technologists, designers and DE&I specialists worked together with the Cadbury team every step of the way. 

The selfie taking feature of the app was a bespoke build to ensure the best possible quality images for the poster generation. Some of the checks we put in place include ensuring the head is in the right position, the lighting is suitable and that all features can be seen and recognized, and the background influences that AI might pick up on, reduced. 

Behind the scenes there was even more to consider. The inputs and training of the tool provided a broad user section representation and every iteration was tested on a selection of images as broad and inclusive as Cadbury customers.  Users have to identify themselves with SMS authentication to be able to use the tool but data is not kept for marketing purposes. 

For the end product we enforced 2 levels of moderations, automatic based on pre-defined criteria and manual through a moderation partner ensuring that every image created was thoroughly checked for security and integrity of the campaign and its participants.