We repurposed traditional advertising properties like Youtube pre-roll ads, search ads, and in-stream ads on streaming platforms to create an unexpected intervention - tailor-made mock disclaimers for every popular video being watched by our code audience.

Lately, there's a new controversy every week in India. There are mass protests over jokes and lyrics, movies getting banned even before they release, companies getting boycotted over 'tone-deaf' ads, and celebrities getting canceled for the most innocuous comments. Even children's shows aren't spared by the cancel culture mob.

Cadbury Perk is a chocolate bar, and its tagline “Perk Khao, Light ho jao” translates to "Eat Perk to lighten up'. Our task was to amplify this message in a culturally relevant and engaging manner.

Lately, audiences have been getting triggered by the most innocuous videos, and content creators have been protecting themselves by flashing disclaimers at the start of every video. We pushed this to the extreme by prefixing mock disclaimers to EVERY popular video on Youtube. Every day, we identified “offensive” moments in the most searched videos, made trigger warnings for each of them in real time, customized them further using back-end automation, and served them as fully contextual pre-roll ads. The twist - the moments we picked were anything but offensive. We took a dig at cancel-culture by flagging off the most harmless moments as potentially offensive. Even recipe videos and kid’s cartoons weren’t spared, and we ended up hijacking over 2,500,000 videos!

As a result, we were able to surprise millions of viewers with a cheeky and unexpected message, and in the spirit of Perk’s tagline, “lighten up” their day.

We identified the most popular, trending and most searched videos being watched by our core audience (aged 16-25), and scanned every video for moments that we could mockingly label potentially offensive. Since trending videos change every day, we developed custom APIs to aid us in refreshing the list and populated new disclaimers every day. With a quick turnaround time, we created our trigger warnings using stock images and deployed them within hours of any video going viral, thereby catching every trend during the campaign period. We also used back-end automation to customize the visuals and text to fit each target video perfectly. Further, we utilized Google’s search ad properties to target the most popular searches on Youtube, thereby increasing our reach to potentially millions of users every day.

Using back-end automation, and a quick turnaround time, we were able to hijack hundreds of videos every day, and ride on the popularity of every video that went viral. We created a bank of assets with customizable stock images and text and used real-time automation to tweak them to fit each video perfectly. By repurposing Youtube’s pre-roll ad property in an innovative way, we were able to seamlessly prefix popular videos with our 6-second trigger warnings. Each disclaimer appeared to be tailor-made for the video that follows it, further adding to the audience’s surprise.

TV shows also tend to flash a disclaimer at the start, so we partnered with TV streaming platforms to create mock disclaimers for their most popular shows and inserted them before each episode. We also utilized Youtube’s keyword search targeting in an innovative way to create disclaimers for the most trending searches every day.

Our trigger warnings hijacked over 2.5 million videos! Perk Disclaimers was one of the most talked-about ad campaigns, owing to its topicality and timing. Within days, the campaign was shared extensively on social media, bringing the campaign 84 million views and 635 million impressions. It was featured in hundreds of news sites, blogs, major publications and TV channels, and generated earned media worth over $500,000. The bold stance taken by the brand considerably increased brand love and social mentions, and made the brand culturally relevant and top-of-mind. Even pack sales shot up by 20%, and the brand recorded its highest-ever sales during the campaign period.