Enter The Jestapo

SOFT drinks are using it to jibe at their rivals, fridges are using it to bring some fresh air to the early blistering summer heat, dotcoms are employing it to stay top-of-the-mouse. Humour has suddenly made a dramatic appearance in advertising and everyone wants you to laugh so that they can laugh too—all the way to the bank of course. It is the flavour of the season and every product category—from adhesives to plywoods to air coolers—are using this route which has been discovered to be paved with gold.

The leaders in this business are the arch soft drink rivals Coke and Pepsi who, with humour, often seem like friends engaged in a banter. Except that it's all deadly serious: they keep taking each other to court. Coca-Cola has always been using Thums Up to snipe at Pepsi while keeping its flagship brand above the fray. This time round Thums Up has been using various ads featuring Salman Khan to propagate the message that Pepsi is for kids because it's sweeter in taste, while Thums Up is for "grown ups". Pepsi has retaliated with a commercial featuring madcap veejay Cyrus Broacha as both mother and son about what it's like to be a kid growing up on a daily dose of Thums Up. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola's clear lime drink Sprite has been taking digs at Pepsi by mimicking its rollercoaster film. The Sprite ad "got a tremendous response", according to Shripad Nadkarni, vice president, marketing, Coca-Cola. According to Nadkarni, Sprite's positioning as a drink that "punctures pretence" goes down best with humour. So Coca-Cola keeps its "eyes and ears open" to identify what's pretentious and laughs at it. A stud in a restaurant trying to impress nymphets or the cool cat on the college steps both learn that "dikhawa hai waste" and to "trust only taste".

Piyush Pandey, group president and national creative director of o&m, says humour has been around for some time and he has used it effectively to drive home messages even earlier. "But now more and more clients understand that sometimes if you take yourself too seriously, the consumer may not have the time to listen." Take the case of some of o&m's clients as diverse as Fevicol, Kelvinator and Onida. All have used humour to highlight their usps but with a tang and a twist that stays happily in your mind.

Humour has a great recall value and adds some zing to what can otherwise be a boring hammering-in of a message. When a brand reiterates its original positioning, humour has worked to be a great route. Think of Kelvinator coming once more and telling you it's the coolest one, as it has been for decades. Yawwwwwn! But see an old man rocking in his chair while his dentures chatter in the tumbler next to him every time someone opens the Kelvinator door in the room and you're ready to opt for Kelvinator for your second fridge or as a wedding gift for your brother or cousin. At the very least, the brand name sticks out of the amorphous mass of so many refrigerators vying for your attention.

Other brands like Onida seem to be using humour to steer away from their original delivery method. The Onida devil launched the product effectively years back but over time, the device perhaps grew stale, and also tied the brand inextricably to the limited range of what the devil could do. Of late, Onida has been using humour to make the brand a friend and funmate. So, in the film made by Bates, the punk principal hiphops to his office with his Onida Candy TV. Or a bunch of wicked oldies frighten away a pretty young thing with the vicious barking of an evil dog on the Onida KY Series TV with its huge blaring sound system.

"Humour has worked well internationally and is a tried and tested route," says Pandey who talks of global brands like Volkswagen, Alka Seltzer and Heineken beer (which refreshed parts that other beers didn't). Clients now understand that whatever route you use you cannot afford to bore the consumer. He is exposed to hundreds of advertising messages so it is critical to cut the clutter. Vijay Murkute, associate account director, Quadrant, who handles Videocon's Kenstar brand of air coolers, agrees. "We had decided on using humour for our coolers which have a very short, seasonal sales cycle," he explains. Coolers typically sell 70 per cent of their annual volumes in a 45-day period following Holi or early March. So the message has to be hammered in relentlessly in that period. The "Kenstar on, garmi gone" commercial showed a man distressed by heat first taking off his shirt, then his vest and then heading for his trousers. Thankfully a Kenstar cooler comes to his—and our—rescue just then. Though sales figures have yet to be assimilated, Videocon is "happy" with the result of the campaign at the retail end. Customers have reacted positively even though the brand interrupts their cricket game every few minutes.

It may be all right for indulgence products like soft drinks but humour could dilute the image of a serious product, right? Wrong. "We take ourselves too seriously," comments Pandey. Experience now shows that humour is working for several high-priced and serious categories including vehicles and even medicines. Alka Seltzer is an over-the-counter remedy for indigestion. The brand uses light-hearted communication despite being a medicine. One of Alka Seltzer's popular commercials shows a newly-wed couple where the wife is an enthusiastic but atrocious cook. The husband has to keep his new wife happy so he eats everything she dishes out with relish only to resort to AS later. The result: she cooks more and more everyday because he enjoys her cooking so much. "Yes it is a medicine but it is not a life-saving drug," explains Pandey, so humour could make the message go down well. Indian brands like Dabur's Isabgol and Eno Fruit Salt have similarly tickled the funny bone to spread their message. Murkute agrees that humour in fact made the Kenstar slogan a catch phrase in its target audience.

Rohit Varma, vice-president, marketing, rediff.com, feels that "for a city person who watches TV to unwind in the evening, a humorous message works well for memorability". Rediffmail, the dotcom's most important sub-brand, is currently running four wacky films to highlight the brand's usp of downloading faster than any rival. Rediffmail's registered user base grew four times by January this year from one million in August last year when the campaign broke out. April figures are yet to be out but promise almost a doubling of the January figure. But does humour work for it because most of the users are young? Varma, on the contrary, feels that humour cuts across demographic and psychographic segments. Now Rediff's US subsidiary is glad to run the same films targeting the Indians in the US where the average user is about 10 years older than an average Indian user.

Humour gives you the opportunity to exaggerate a point which is probably why it is best remembered. But a warning here: humour has to be funny. Using humour can be not just the most arduous route but the joke could fall as flat as a bad soufflé. Everyone with a successful humour ad agree that they are careful about scripts and how they are handled.Pandey agrees that three times out of four, humorous ads even at prestigious places like Cannes don't make you laugh. And that's definitely not funny.