Flipkart brings back ‘kidults’ in an ad for its grocery vertical

The ad is a pun on the phrase ‘dhoka khaa rahe ho’ – where a family’s groceries eat into their monthly budget and savings.

In Flipkart’s latest ad, a family’s grocery expenditure is personified as another ‘kidult’ – one who literally eats into their savings. In the course of the ad, we see the groceries literally breaking open the couple’s savings (in the form of a piggy bank).

The action is a pun on the phrase ‘breaking the bank’ and plays on a very real problem that most couples have – of groceries and living expenses taking up a huge part of their budget. This is the first time we’re seeing ‘kidults’ advertise for the Flipkart app’s grocery vertical.

Manish Kumar, Senior Vice President - Grocery, General Merchandise and Furniture, Flipkart, said, “Being a homegrown player, Flipkart is committed to driving innovation in Grocery category and has worked towards massively scaling up its operations across the country. Customer-centricity is at the heart of everything we do, and we want to ensure that our customers are given a wide array of selection and high-quality offerings without eating into their savings. Our pan-India campaign brings this awareness to customers, as they continue to look to e-commerce to meet their essential and household demand needs.”

Nandita Sinha, Vice President - Customer and Marketing, Flipkart, said, “Flipkart has always been at the forefront of bringing innovative campaigns to consumers, giving them a chance to evaluate and make an informed decision. With Grocery being an important charter for us, we wanted to bring the right promise to our customers through our value-driven proposition. We want to encourage consumers to look into their shopping behavior and find the best way to ensure maximum savings.”

Flipkart now services Grocery to customers in the metro hubs and in cities such as Mysore, Warangal, Alwar, Aligarh, and Agra through its satellite-expansion model; with a robust expansion pipeline. Flipkart recently launched the first Grocery fulfillment center in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh which will support its ability to deliver a wide selection of grocery products to consumers across Lucknow, Kanpur and Allahabad. The latest campaign from Flipkart Grocery is available across Television, Digital media channels and the Flipkart app.

In the past, ‘kidults’ have been used in ads for Flipkart’s fashion vertical. They have been featured in ads alongside Bollywood celebrities Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt. In most ads, the celebrity endorsers are emphasising on the deals that users can find while shopping on the Flipkart app.

On the grocery vertical, the last development was when the platform introduced a voice assistant feature. The voice-first conversational AI platform has been built by Flipkart’s in-house technology team with solutions for speech recognition, natural language understanding, machine translation, and text to speech for Indian languages.

These solutions are capable of understanding vernacular languages, such as Hindi, e-commerce categories and products, and tasks such as searching for a product, understanding product details, placing an order, etc.

The indigenously developed AI platform is built to automatically detect the language spoken by the user and, in real-time, transcribe, translate, transliterate and understand the user’s intent to have engaging shopping-related conversations in various Indian languages.