© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

Saw an ad for Google Duo the other day, and this one is worth talking about. But probably not worth much more.

It shows the freshest couple in town – who else but actor Anushka Sharma and cricketer Virat Kohli! – at their admirable best. Even earlier, every young couple had wanted to be like them: rich, famous, good looking, and young forever. Now, in this video ad available on YouTube, we see the camaraderie between them as Anushka plays a prank on Virat.

Agreed, the laughing wife and the trusting-but-fooled husband are quite adorable. However, in a video calling market increasingly captured by Whatsapp – everyone uses Whatsapp messaging, and its video calling is seamless with messaging – it is not clear how developing a celebrity-based liking for its brand will help Duo.

What Duo seems to have done is to (spend a considerable sum of money and) gather two celebrities to show us an eminently watchable but equally pointless advertisement where the message is drowned in the fun. Today, Duo needs to emphasize its technical superiority through the content of the advertisement itself. But the brand emphasizes its technical quality only in the very last line of the video.

Google Duo’s latest ad seems to illustrate a classic mistake that advertisers commit: make an ad that’s so interesting that it overwhelms the message of the ad itself. Which is why humor in advertising is such dangerous territory. One campaign that has avoided falling into this trap is Vodafone and the ZooZoos, which became successful on precisely this dimension: despite the white creatures having been created out of thin air and engaging in humorous antics, they stood clearly for brand Vodafone without taking away any existing brand equity. They also made Vodafone adorable while communicating serious messages on top-up plans and cheaper roaming services and so on.

But not all advertisements can chart this territory safely. If this particular ad is anything to go by, Duo’s advertising strategy requires a thorough revamp. If nothing else, the strategy needs to be goal-driven so that the ad serves its purpose.