Cadbury Perk floats disclaimers on Internet, advises netizens to ‘take it light’

Constant communication by brands on their social media channels is an important success metric. But it has also given rise to brands facing the brunt of cancel culture.

Cadbury Perk recently launched a campaign, asking people who tend to take offence quickly, to ‘take it light’. The ad’s voice-over says how one tends to come across a new controversy daily. It is followed by an apology. The apology is then followed by another controversy.

The brand noticed that people these days get offended quite easily about a lot of issues. So, as a part of the campaign, the Cadbury team flooded the Internet with Perk disclaimers. However, these aren’t usual disclaimers that you may have noticed before streaming any explicit content.

These are funny videos of Perk advising Internet users to ‘take it easy’. The ad copy at the end of the disclaimer continues the brand communication of ‘Perk Khao, Light Ho Jao’.

These disclaimers may appear on YouTube searches or videos you wish to view (as pre-rolls). For example, before you watch a particular food recipe video, you may get a disclaimer that the chopped vegetables may get offended by the act. Or, if you search for a certain ‘rain song’, you may get one which says that the upcoming video may offend people who’re facing water shortage these days.

The campaign has been conceptualised by Ogilvy. The brand’s media agency Wavemaker has also worked on it.

As per the brand, each day its artificial intelligence (AI) targets the most searched videos on the Internet and then creates custom-made disclaimers for them. These disclaimers are created basis the content one intends to consume and are programmed to be strategically served before such content.

Monosij Bandyopadhyay, category marketing manager, Mondelēz International, posted about the campaign on his LinkedIn profile. The post read, “... While the much talked about cancel culture has its roots in the offline world, but it truly flourishes on the Internet. Almost anything up on the net, offends someone or the other, initiating a typical chain reaction with never-ending debates, abuses, boycotts, apologies, debates over apologies, so on and so forth. In short, the Internet has become quite touchy.”

“The team at Cadbury Perk came up with a unique campaign idea to have some fun and nudge people to ‘take it light’, a philosophy the brand strongly espouses,” he added.