Humor for New Beginnings

Online shopping is a relatively new concept in India. Although it has been many years since online shopping was introduced, recently it has gained popularity with the youth.

However with the recent Ad of Olx, they have not targeted the youth but their target audience are the middle aged people.

The Ad has a woman who wants to buy new household commodities but her husband points out that there isnt enough space in the house to keep it. However by the time he returns from his office, his wife has sold many items within a short span on the olx website. The ad has the woman in the process of selling the household products on olx website on background music of the famous 'Womaniya' song.

The humor factor helps the advertisers to build a connect of the new idea or concept of online selling and buying of products with the target audience who otherwise might have ignored the advertisement as its a new idea

This ad also would encourage the people who arent tech savvy and are scared of online selling and buying products, to learn the new technology and also try this new idea.

Humor has a major role to play to develop a connect with the audience and in sutuations where the product or service is new for the specific target audience, the tool of Humor can be extremely useful.

Source for the Video- YouTube

Surrogate advertising and Humor

The previous blog was a critique on a popular ad of Imperial Blue Cassete n Cd's.

Few years back imperial Blue had come up with another adverisement playing around the same tag line ' Men will be men'

The ad had a man talking to his friend about the place he had gone for dinner with his wife last night. However he is unable to recollect the name of the restaurant. So he turns to ask his wife( who is working in the background) about the name of the place....however to the audience's surprise he cant even recollect his wife's name and he tries recollecting her name by giving clues to his friend like ' Its a flower', ' It has a sweet fragrance', ' It has thorns' and when the friend guesses it right- ' Rose', he calls out to his wife saying '"Rose Darling....."
This is followed by the tagline ' Men will be Men'

From this ad and the ad mentioned in the previos blog we get to know the advertising strategy. Since advertising alchohol is not allowed, the adverisers have very cleverly used the tool of advertising for the Imperial Blue brand and the product being ' Cassete and Cd's' and not Alchohol.

Surrogate advertising has the intention of increasing the brand recall and it focusses less on the product.

When humor is used in surrogate advertising it has a powerful effect on the brand recall.
Its a clever and effective way of surrogate adverising.
Humor has always been one of the most popular tools of advertising and it is definately beneficial for surrogate advertising as well.

A recent humorous Ad critique.

One of my personal favourite recent humourous ad is the Imperial Blue Cassete and Cd's Ad. It basically plays around the line  ' Men will be men'

The ad shows a man who is at the parking place. He goes near a fancy car and just shoo's away some local man wiling away his time near the car. Few attractive girls notice this man with his fancy car and this makes the man happy and boosts his ego as well. However as soon as the girls leave, we see the man goes to another small normal car where the same local man is wiling away his time, yet again he shoo's him away....and we get to know that this small car is the actual car of the man and he just pretended that the fancy car belonged to him in order to get attention from the women. The ad ends with the tag line 'Men will be men'

The background music is some old classic hindi ghazal. This makes the ad even more interesting and humorous and the use of old song in the background also is symbolic of  that men have always been this way since ages.

Here we see that the product itself is not shown in a humorous way but the trait of the product and a brand feature is being presented in a humorous way.The humor creates an instant connect with the audience

This ad in my opinion is a perfect example of using subtle humor to convey the brand image and yet not overshadow the product.