I stumbled on to an ad on my Instagram feed, that I had found very funny when it originally aired. You can watch the ad here before we go any further.
When I rewatched this ad from the lens of what can I learn from it, I found it had a lot of lessons for us as leaders and as communicators:
Lesson 1: Setting the context
Whenever we are trying to tell a story, it is important to set the context within which the story is going to play out. The idea here is to make the context as familiar and relatable to our audience as possible.
This familiarity opens them up for novel ideas that we might want to share next. The more relatable the context, the higher is the recall for the piece of communication.
The scene set for this specific ad is a fairly common scene for the intended audience (middle class people in India) as it is very likely that they have seen a street performer like this in their life at some point in time.
Lesson 2: Respect the Intelligence of your audience
It is a good technique in story telling to leave gaps in the progression of the story that the audience can fill in. This makes them involved in the story and hence engaged with the story. This also means that the story teller respects the intelligence of the audience to be able to fill in the blanks.
In this ad, the admen believe that the audience will be able to make the connection between the funny ending of the commercial to the tragic end that they might experience with the unexpected death of a loved one.
Lesson 3: Anything can be made funny
The concept of insurance is all about risk and being prepared for doom and gloom scenarios.
Most insurance advertisements are all emotional tugs at taking care of our family whether we are alive or if we are gone. It is about being prepared for death.
However, as this advertisement shows, with a little bit of creativity and novel thinking, even such a gloomy thing can be made funny and relatable.
Conclusion
In conclusion, all I would say is that for any piece of communication to be remembered and hence be effective, it needs to fulfil the following conditions – it has to be relatable, emotional and engaging.
Same is true whether that piece of communication is an ad for an insurance product, or a keynote address by a leader laying out the vision of the organisation or a commercial movie produced to entertain us.
