Inside DDB Mudra’s Cannes Lions entries: BotHard and The Hire

This year, the Indian advertising industry is all geared up to meet the expectations around Cannes Lions after last year’s resounding success. Continuing with our series on the entries from India this year, we look at DDB Mudra’s two of their five entries.

Three of the entries that the agency is sending are - McDonald's 'EatQual' and Stayfree's 'It's just a period' in the category of creative effectiveness. They will also be sending an entry in the in the newly formed gaming category - BGMI's 'Machine-gun Mouth'.

Here, Rahul Mathew, Chief Creative Officer, DDB Mudra Group, takes us through two of the other entries.

MTV India’s BotHard

The campaign will be sent for four categories - Direct, Entertainment Lion for Music, Radio & Audio, Social & Influencer. The agency created BotHard, an AI-based rapper, to introduce rap to the youth in a country where film music dominates. It is built on the GPT3 platform and can imitate the rhyme schemes and patterns used by various rappers. So, it can generate lyrics that match the style of the chosen rapper for any word you input as a prompt. The generated lyrics are then converted into vocals using a text-to-speech engine and added to a rap beat. While the vocal track is being created, a lyric video is also generated parallelly to produce the final track.

On the brief, Matthew said, “The idea was to build an interactive way to allow participation and involve people to experience the rap scene themselves. The success of BotHard drove conversations beyond the platform and attracted scores of curious audiences, resulting in unprecedented organic traction. The campaign served as an example of MTV India's constantly evolving repertoire of tech-first consumer experiences.”

An example of BotHard -

https://youtube.com/shorts/kcDuZvkiqcs?feature=share

Speaking about the challenges they faced, Matthew said, “The challenges while creating BotHard AI rapper were to balance authenticity while appealing to a broader audience. It meant striking a balance between not alienating the masses by being too niche, but also not being too watered-down that people who influence the category don't find it worth their time.”

The campaign was effective in achieving its strategic objective of taking hip-hop to the masses since its innovations were enjoyed by the genre's occasional listeners, who then went on to consume the content and champion it. This campaign resulted in the creation of over 350K rap videos. MTV Hustle Season 2.0 experienced a 9-fold increase in digital views from Season 1, with over 2 billion views.

Indeed - The Hire

The campaign will be entered into two categories - Creative B2B and Film. The campaign is a set of three films talking about the wrong hires and how Indeed is fixing that problem. Speaking about the brief, Matthew said, “Having entered India in 2017, Indeed was a relatively new player in a cluttered category and suffered from a lack of awareness. To create differentiation and build awareness, we decided to talk to an audience that went largely unnoticed: recruiters, particularly those within the SMB sector, which is one of the fastest-growing segments in the country and is characterized by inefficient and informal hiring processes.”

The campaign reached 55 million unique audiences, creating over 130 million impressions. The average click-through rate for the campaign assets ranged between 0.43% to 0.65%, significantly higher than the usual range of 0.04% to 0.08%. In the post-campaign Q4 period, the Indeed app on average witnessed over 2.9 million downloads monthly, which was 2x more than Q1.

“For the first time in the brand’s history in India, Indeed secured an app installation growth rate surpassing that of our competing brands who were more established in the Indian market than us,” he said.

Matthew also said that they have always been very picky about the work that they send to the festival. Cannes Lion 2023 is set to happen from June 19-23.