Online Humor Advertising: Does İt Connect with the Audience?

Abstract

Consumer attention has become very scarce. Brands are waging advertising wars for consumer attention and brand recall. To avoid the problem, many brands have taken the route of humor in advertising. Thus, Humor Advertising is increasingly becoming popular on social media. Previously the researchers have demonstrated that people associate humor with something positive. This positive emotion can help a brand to create a positive connection with the customers.

In today's world of internet, brands compete with each other on social media to gain attention and recall. Customers also give their opinion online freely without any hesitation. The question that arises is how the audience perceives the message, do these types of advertisement convert into the positive sentiment of consumer, are these types of advertisement have any tangible outcome for the brand. The objective of the research paper is to analyze the opinions of the customers using sentiment analysis and how they perceive humor in the advertisement. For the purpose of research, we have taken two campaigns: #PhenkoNahiJodo by Fevikwik Pidilite and Whopper Neutrality by Burger King. To analyze the impact of the online campaign, lexicon-based sentiment analysis and machine learning tone analysis (by IBM Watson) were used. The sentiment score for both the campaign came positive. Thus, the research suggests that the humor in advertisement induces positive sentiment about the campaign and brand.