Is ‘Being Human’ Advertising’s Safest Bet Right Now?

Advertising has always run back to emotion when technology starts moving too fast. Right now, that retreat is unmistakable. As algorithms accelerate, brands are slowing their language and talking about warmth, intent, and drawing a bold line between what machines can generate and what humans still feel. 

The question is whether this turn to emotion is a long-term strategy or simply the next creative crutch. 

Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk’s Valentine’s campaign sits squarely inside that tension. 

The film doesn’t shout anti-AI. It doesn’t sermonise. There’s no spectacle, no gimmickry, no clever tech flex. Instead, it falls back on an old Cadbury truth: expressing love takes effort. AI-generated expressions are set against moments of human hesitation. One flows effortlessly. The other stumbles. And in that awkward pause, the film suggests, meaning is born. 

What makes the campaign interesting isn’t the insight. It’s the timing. 

By the time Valentine’s advertising hit screens, artificial intelligence had moved from novelty to noise. Its role in shaping language, emotion and persuasion was being openly debated across agencies. Global brands—including Coca-Cola—were already experimenting, loudly and publicly, with AI-generated creative. 

Against that backdrop, Cadbury didn’t compete with the machine. It quietly reminded viewers what the machine can’t replicate. 

And that restraint may be the campaign’s most deliberate move of all. It looks like emotion did not disappear in this shift but became easier to produce.  

For Cadbury Silk, ease is not a neutral development.  

Social Moments as Emotional Currency 

Cadbury’s advertising history in India has rarely centred on product claims. Instead, it has focused on social moments—celebration, apology, affection—using chocolate as a mediator. Silk sharpened that positioning further, becoming associated with romantic expression, particularly when saying something felt awkward or risky.  

That positioning relied on one assumption: emotional expression carried a cost.  

When technology lowers that cost, the value equation changes.  

The Valentine’s film did not state this problem directly, but the brand acknowledged it in its own articulation of intent. Nitin Saini, Vice President – Marketing at Mondelez India, said, “In a world where technology is increasingly shaping how we communicate, this year’s film reflects on what makes love truly human – emotion, intent, and effort.” The emphasis on effort was telling. It suggested the campaign was less about rejecting technology and more about reasserting what the brand believed still mattered.  

The agency’s thinking followed a similar line. Kainaz Karmakar and Harshad Rajadhyaksha, Chief Creative Officers at Ogilvy India, says that the insight emerged from observing how younger couples were using AI even in romantic contexts. The film, he noted, was built around what AI could not experience because it had never been in love.  

The restraint of the execution mattered as much as the insight. The campaign did not attempt to showcase technological sophistication, nor did it position Cadbury as progressive or experimental. It stayed within familiar emotional territory.  

That restraint is what some in the industry read as the campaign’s real point. “Ogilvy’s Cadbury Silk Valentine’s take isn’t breaking new ground, but it’s choosing the right ground to stand on,” says Mitul Shah, Founder & CCO at Calculated Chaos- an ad agency. In a world drunk on AI answers, he adds, it quietly reminds us that feelings aren’t prompts, and love isn’t generatable. Not a revolution, more a gentle human nudge. Sometimes that’s enough.   

Advertising often functions as a response to anxiety—about relevance, attention, or erosion of meaning. In periods of technological acceleration, brands tend to lean into sensory and emotional cues to stabilise trust. “People interact with brands by assigning intent and reliability much as they do with other humans,” says N. Chandramouli, CEO, TRA Research. The risk, he warned, is that when many brands reach for emotionality at the same time, it stops working as positioning and starts functioning as trope.  

Cadbury’s advantage is that it does not need to newly claim humanity. It has accumulated emotional credibility over decades. Silk, in particular, has trained consumers to associate the brand with expression rather than indulgence. That history allows the campaign to be understated without sounding opportunistic.  

Still, the stance carries trade-offs.  

But there are also unanswered questions. The campaign arrived without performance metrics or claims of impact. There is no immediate evidence of how the idea translated into behaviour. That absence suggests the objective was not short-term response, but longer-term protection of brand meaning.  

Is ‘more human than machines’ a meaningful stance or the next creative trope?  

For brands whose identities are closely tied to technology, claims of humanity are still taking shape. In Cadbury’s case, where emotional expression has long been central to brand meaning, the campaign sits within an existing framework rather than introducing a new one.  

The campaign doesn’t settle the tech–emotion debate. It simply bets that effort still equals sincerity. Whether that holds will decide if ‘human over machine’ is strategy—or just shorthand.