MUMBAI: Humour in advertising  can really strike a funny bone  and have  us doubling over in laughter! It can be a great conversation starter, leader and silence breaker. And a great ad re-caller. However, it all depends on where the humorous advertising is being placed.

The Indian Institutes of Technology are known to be filled with the super intelligent young folk, actually young adults, but they are also the places where the most amount of things that should not happen, happen. Especially after mugging and assignment  time is over.

Fun, gags, leg pulling, and several other un-mentionable things take place as some of  the mild engineering students in the day turn into evil Hydes late by night. Surely, they will know how to take a joke, right?

Wrong! As the condom brand Durex from the Reckitt Benckiser stable discovered. 

Durex chose to sponsor the very famous IIT Moodi Indigo festival in Mumbai in a bid to create awareness about safe sex with protection. (During Mood I fest really, where smoking up is pretty common and you find folks cozying up in hidden nooks and crannies, at least it was the case at one time - the professors and the dean would never guess!).

Durex decided to take the  ‘pun’ning  route to educate the young ‘adult AI, ML, LLM-obsessed students, many of whom are culturing and  nurturing unicorn start up ideas in their heads.

The Durex standees had tongue in cheek (pun intended again) slogans: “Always up for a good screw,” “Mood U and I. Play with Durex,” “Here the Feelings are always real! We don’t fake around!,””Here because we found the Jee spot.Play with Durex,””Tonight Won’t Come Twice,””I am always a late-comer” and so on.

Guess the slogans were and are worth a laugh. 

Or at least a giggle.  

Not for some students though.  They rose up as a crowd and voiced their complaints against the so called “vulgar” jokes.

And guess what?

While Durex condoms offer protection, no one came forward to protect Durex. The standees had to be prematurely withdrawn and stacked up in a corner hidden from sight.

The joke really backfired on Durex.

So did Durex go wrong?

Some like experienced marketer and brand custodian Arpita  Yadav think so.

“Everyone, including me loves the quirk that Durex brings on to their social media, even ads. But not sure if I have ever seen it in an outdoor setting, let alone on a college campus. I am all in for educating kids, but don't think campus authorities could have ever approved this. Imagine the backlash from parents, teachers, and some students. I am actually on the fence about this one: humour might be the best way for spreading awareness, but is it?,” posted Yadav on Linkedin. (Her post on Linkedin has started quite a discussion on whether Durex was right or wrong; the scales seemed to be weighted in favour of wrong place, at the time of writing.)

So agency executives and brand managers, hope you will learn from this. It’s different strokes for different folks. (once again, pun intended). 

(A big thank you to Arpita Yadav for the pictures as well. No copyright infringement is intended)