BharatMatrimony goes the AI route to show the relevance of creativity

BharatMatrimony has rolled out a campaign 'my perfect valentine’ through which it aims to showcase the importance of connecting with real people for real love.

 

Conceptualised by Wondrlab, the campaign kicked off with a profile created on Instagram for a user called Aaditya Iyer. Using influencer marketing, the profile received around 10,600 followers in a week with several comments about Iyer being the perfect prospective groom. Then, on Valentine's Day, a video revealed that the user wasn't real and his image was created by using Midjourney. The captions for the user's posts were created using ChatGPT. 

 

Campaign India caught up with Arjun Bhatia, chief marketing officer and senior vice president, Matrimony.com, and Amit Akali, managing partner and creative head, Wondrlab, to learn more about this campaign, which is being dubbed as the first one to be created by using AI in its entirety.

 

Edited excerpts:

 

What was the brief for this campaign?

 

Arjun Bhatia (AB): When people are in their initial parts of looking for their life partner, they have set notions and expectations. What we have as a platform observed after interacting with thousands of our members is that most of these longlists put them on a journey where they are never able to decide to get married. If they feel they've found someone who has met their criterion, there's bound to be an expectation mismatch in the future which causes turbulence either in their courtship period or marriage. So this was one aspect we wanted to address by saying that no one is perfect. 

 

The other aspect was this trend of ChatGPT that emerged in the last five weeks. People have been discussing how perfect it is and how it's passing several exams. It personifies the best of human capability using technology. We wanted to use this trend to make a point and tell youngsters that AI is great and does revolutionalise the future, but when it comes to human beings, we are naturally imperfect and flawed and the whole beauty of relationships is that two people come together and are authentic. We wanted to utilise AI to make a strong point about the tradition and culture of marriage.

 

How did you arrive at this?

 

Amit Akali (AA): Bhavesh Kosambia, Adheeraj and the team came up with the idea that AI can create someone wonderful, and good-looking, and give it profound thoughts, who real people can fall in love with. 

 

AI gives perfection, but when it comes to marriage, Bharatmatrimony gives you access to real people out there. 

 

The founder Murugavel Janakiraman had a philosophy and has always told us that at the end of the day, there's nothing like perfection, but there must be someone perfect for you to spend your life with. This tied in well with the messaging we wanted to put through that the AI-driven pursuit for perfection doesn't cut through and you need to come down to real people. 

 

How did you end up creating buzz around the profile to get to 10,600 followers in a week? 

 

AB: We created this profile on 7 Feb and rolled out two to three posts daily. 

 

On 10 Feb, we engaged with around 100 micro and nano influencers to create awareness about the profile Aaditya Iyer. 

 

We have been boosting the posts on Instagram. If a user likes the post/content, that leads to a follow and that's what we've seen. We have seen followers increase organically as well. 

 

We've seen the chatter around AI and it taking away jobs in advertising, while many claim that it's those who use it creatively will succeed. Is this what you believe they were referring to?

 

AB: Yes, there's a lot of concern about what will happen in the future, especially regarding jobs. I don't know what will happen five or ten years later, but in the immediate future one thing is for sure - human intellect and creativity will help break new barriers. This will be out of the scope of AI. 

 

ChatGPT and any other AI-powered tool have the power of metadata. They can process billions of bytes of data and come back with whatever you're asking for. For any breakthrough, you need the human mind. AI will make tasks easier, and yes we'll need upskilling in terms of how to use it. That's one of the messages that Amit and I wanted to put out to the advertising and marketing fraternity. Great content writers and creative people won't lose their jobs.

 

AA: Since Elon Musk dropped the tweet around ChatGPT, it's been crazy. We've been discussing it and the whole conversation has been around it and whether AI will creative people redundant. It was top of our minds and we wanted to do something to prove that the creativity of the human mind is more important. We had a tremendously brave and aware client in Arjun and his team. Both of us were thinking about this. 

 

We ended up using more talent than we usually do for a campaign. We made a job. Bhavesh and the team saw a lot of pictures on AI. He saw that sometimes AI looks like AI and sometimes there is the realness that comes with it. He studied a lot of pictures that didn't look like AI and looked real. He realised there are certain people out there who know how to use it better. It's all about collaborations in today's day and age, and so we got certain experts who can use AI better by giving the right prompts and input. So we got them in to work and work on the campaign and truly fool people. 

 

What are your expectations from this campaign?

 

AB: We are very happy that we are the first ones to do something like this using the power of fantastic technology. From a company standpoint, we want to have people absorb this message about not running after perfection. Hopefully, we catch the attention of youngsters who are getting into the bracket of getting married.

 

Do you expect a few awards too for this campaign?

 

AB: Yes, it's the first of its kind in India and hopefully it should win a few.