Centerfruit's voice-AI tongue twister plays over plain phone calls — Abby 2026 GP

Rural Uttar Pradesh is core for Centerfruit, yet an estimated 40% of rural households lack TV and 50% lack internet, so screen-based campaigns miss them. The brand needed to revive its iconic 'Kaisi Jeebh Laplapayee' taste idea beyond metros.

A voice AI calls feature phones and runs a live, dialect-native tongue-twister contest with real-time scoring — no data, app or smartphone needed.

With WPP, BharatGPT.ai and Google Cloud, Centerfruit built an AI-over-telephony experience: the AI calls users on feature phones, greets them in their dialect, challenges them to repeat tongue twisters like 'Pake ped par paka papita', scores their delivery in real time via Gemini, jokes back, answers questions and awards prizes — a full game show with no app, data or smartphone.

Called the first voice-based GenAI brand activation in India, it turned basic telephony into an interactive marketing rail, gathered consent-based first-party data, reached rural audiences TV and digital miss, and took the Grand Prix in the Technology category at Abby 2026.

Centerfruit, Perfetti Van Melle India's fruit-flavoured chewing gum, had an iconic Hindi tagline — 'Kaisi Jeebh Laplapayee' (what a twisting tongue) — that celebrates how the candy makes the tongue dance. But its heartland audience was out of reach of its own medium: in rural India, large shares of households have no TV and no internet connection.

In 2025 the brand answered with a first-of-its-kind voice-based GenAI activation built with WPP, BharatGPT.ai and Google Cloud. The AI calls users directly on their feature phones, greets them in their local dialect and challenges them to repeat tongue twisters such as 'Pake ped par paka papita'; Gemini scores pronunciation, speed and clarity in real time, the AI banters back, and winners get prizes — a gamified brand experience delivered entirely over a voice call.

'Kaisi Jeebh Laplapayee' is more than a tagline — it is the game mechanic. With no app, data plan or smartphone required, a chewing gum campaign turned the most basic device in India into an interactive channel, and the activation doubled as a consent-based first-party data collection point.

The work was recognized at Goafest 2026, where Perfetti Van Melle India won the Grand Prix in the Technology category at the Abby Awards, a rare brand-led win on an agency-heavy leaderboard, and the 'Kaisi Jeebh Laplapayee' platform continued into new films in 2026.

The insight inverted the brief: instead of pulling rural consumers toward digital, the campaign rebuilt a digital-native game for the one device everyone owns — the feature phone.

The tagline became the mechanic: a tongue-twister contest is the perfect expression of 'jeebh laplapayee', so the game and the brand idea are the same thing.

Using BharatGPT.ai and Gemini for dialect-native speech and real-time scoring made the call feel local, personal and playful rather than like an automated message.

Running on telephony meant zero data cost for users, turning inclusion itself into the creative idea — and into clean first-party data for the brand.

When the audience lives outside digital infrastructure, rebuild the experience for the device they already own — the plain phone call became a channel no competitor was using.

The activation helped revive 'Kaisi Jeebh Laplapayee' as Centerfruit's master platform: the brand extended it to a Maha Kumbh street-food take-over in early 2025 and launched new films in 2026, including a wedding-robbery comedy, while the voice challenge earned the Technology Grand Prix at Abby 2026. The idea also became a reference point in Indian marketing for running brand experiences on feature phones and for gathering consent-based first-party data in rural markets.