ABOUT

The creative idea:
In Bangladesh, approximately 20 million people don’t know their actual birth date. Prevalence of home birth and lack of documentation practices till the late 1990’s contributed to this situation the most. Tasty Treat, being the largest bakery chain in the country took a unique initiative to find out their actual birth date. Blending culture and technology, they created a generative AI platform, installed it at their stores and invited people there to jointly find out the dates. This initiative sought to provide the immense joy of finding one’s actual birthday together and celebrate it for the first time.
People who don’t know their actual birth date often don’t celebrate it. Even if they do, they celebrate their official birth date as their birthday. Such celebration often comes with a pang of sadness, as deep down they know it’s not real. Tasty Treat being the largest bakery chain wanted to do something about it.
Enter, The Best Birthday Gift.
People who don’t know their actual birth date refer to the date relating with significant events around the time of birth. Through a unique generative AI module, Tasty Treat enables one to use such reference points to deduce the accurate date. This innovative solution combines technology with cultural nuances so that everyone can celebrate their birthday on the right day.
Example of such narration would be: I heard I was born after the liberation war; Bangladesh experienced an unprecedented flood and famine that year; popular movie-star duo Razzaq-Kabori released a Bangla film; Pakistan’s PM visited Dhaka that year; my grandfather was a doctor and a Cholera outbreak in the villages around kept him very busy; my family used to live in Sirajganj Enayetpur and the WAPDA Embankment was breached on the same day.
The Best Birthday Gift is a custom AI-module that takes such memories and collection of events and triangulates those to find the actual date of birth.
The execution
The data engine consists of a vector store database and OpenAI's large language model to create a Retrieval-Augmented Generative (RAG) application that can find birth date based on user-described events that occurred in the past. The AI module has been fed with huge amount of historical data from diverse buckets, and it triangulates the date by linking the memories to the dataset.
The module was installed in 150 Tasty Treat outlets nationwide, along with special booths to collect birth-related information from interested visitors. The initiative was launched with a film about a teenager's quest to discover her father's real birthday, inviting viewers to visit Tasty Treat outlets and unearth their own or their loved ones' actual birthdates. Once found, people could pre-order/order a customized birthday cake to mark the occasion. This initiative seamlessly blended technology, personal histories, and celebration, transforming each outlet into a hub of rediscovery and joyous revelations.
The results
The campaign ran from March 24 to April 25 and got huge response. In the first two weeks, the 150 outlets saw a whooping 48% increase in footfall and 15.9% increase in business. The AI module can’t keep any personal data but after the first two weeks the dashboard counts a total of 54,854 attempts made to find out birth date, among which 1256 attempts were successful. The rest of the visitors didn’t have sufficient datapoints to feed the module and were requested to come back with more data.
The campaign gained momentum on social media channels too. The campaign film was viewed 2.1 million times, has been shared 1457 times and generated 59551 engagements. The social media influencers also organically picked this up, visited the stores and shared their experiences, propelling its reach further.