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Online Humor Advertising: Does İt Connect with the Audience?

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 International Journal of Advanced Science and Technology
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Online Humor Advertising: Does İt Connect with the Audience?
Hem Shah1, Dr Preetha Menon2, Nikhil Bagree3
1,3
Symbiosis Institute of Business Management Pune, Symbiosis International (Deemed
University) Pune ,2Symbiosis Institute of Business Management Pune, Head – Symbiosis Centre
for Behavioural Studies Symbiosis International (Deemed University) Pune
1
preethamenon@sibmpune.edu.in, 2hem.shah21@associates.sibmpune.edu.in,
3
nikhil.bagree21@associates.sibmpune.edu.in

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.
Keywords: Sentiment Analysis, Humor in Advertising, Text Analysis, Opinion Analysis,
Netnography, Twitter Analysis

1 Introduction:

Advertising has a great influence on our lives. It makes consumer emotional. It can mold the purchase
behavior of the consumers.[1] It can drive and guide through the decision-making process. But the
attention span of the consumer has decreased drastically. Advertisers are fighting to gain a share of mind
in consumers’ heads. For that advertisers are using many methods, like using a celebrity, click-baits,
humor, etc. In today’s world, humor in advertising has become very common. Generally, humor is
associated with positivity and happiness. Also, the advertisement which has humor has good chance of
being viral.[2][3] But the impact of the humor on the consumer mind is still unclear. This is because
measuring the impact and effectiveness of humor in advertising is still very complex.[4][5]

After the internet is created, the consumer becomes more vocal about brands. Consumer shares his/her
opinions using social media more frequently. This democratization of online media helps the consumer to
share his/her voice regarding any topic any time almost free of charge. For brands to know this consumer
opinion becomes very crucial because one bad or negative experience can ruin the brand image or

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reputation on a larger scale.

The focus of the research is how the consumer reacts to the humor in advertising. Can these humorous ads
create a positive sentiment among the consumer? How people engage verbally with the ads? How do
people interact with the brand on social media? The research paper tries to answer these questions.

The research on social interaction on digital platforms is called Netnography. In this research, we used
netnography to find whether the advertisement has any impact on consumer perception or not. With the
rise of online consumer research, Netnography's approach is gaining in significance and is being used
extensively for research into online consumer behavior and online marketing [6]. Sentiment Analysis is a
part of Netnophaphy studies. Any opinion given by any individual through which the emotions, attitude
thoughts can be expressed is known as the sentiment. This sentiment can be for any event, product, person
or brand. Evaluating this sentiment through various methods is called Sentiment analysis.

For this research, we have used unique tweets shared on Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging platform
where people express their opinion in less than 280 characters. Because of the conciseness of the text, the
message is straight forward that can be analyzed easily. The Twitter tweets were run through the
sentiment analysis module of Twinword and Tone Analyzer tool of IBM Watson.

The research aims to find tangible output by analyzing the customer opinions posted online using
sentiment analysis. Sentiment Analysis is textual analysis in which the opinions of the people are gauged
by the written text.

2 Lıterature Revıew:

Use of humor in Advertising

The humor in advertising was not that popular as it is today. The use of humor increased in the US after
the world war. Post-World War II, the expenditure on advertising tripled from $1.9 Billion to $5.7 Billion
in just 5 years. The television fueled the competition between brands for the attention of the customers.
The brands gave agencies tools to express humor. Since then, humor in advertising got the credence and
use of it has been growing since.[7]

People’s attitude towards humorous advertisements

Previous research has shown that people associate humor with positiveness. Humor gives them a feeling
of happiness and makes people laugh.[8] and because of this, the use of humor in advertising has
increased. A humorous context can increase the likability of the source. It also creates positive emotions
in the customers' minds.[9]

One of the major concerns of marketers is also brand recall. According to research, ads are more
memorable when the humor is strong.[10][11][12][13] Also, the preference for an advertisement for the
same product is also more towards humorous in certain categories. The study suggests that customers
favor humor over serious entertainment, especially when the product is low engagement. [14] Every
brand wants consumers' attention and advertising has been used extensively to gain attention. Humor in
advertisement can be helpful to cut through the noise. According to Davis (2000), people usually are
exposed to 6000 advertisements on average. And in any given year, they are getting in touch with more
than 25,000 products. Clow (2007) suggests humorous advertisement attracts attention and stimulates the
imagination of the audience through its ability to cut through the clutter.

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3 Data & Methodology:

The research aims to check the effect of humor in advertising on brand equity. We found that the most
optimal way to quantify brand equity on social media platforms like Twitter is via Sentiment Analysis.
The research can be divided into three steps as given in the Fig. 1 below:

Figure 1. Methodology steps for research

Data Extraction

First of all, the keywords have to be decided for the data extraction. To get a basic idea which key word
should be used to extract the data, we used Twitter Advanced search. This tool helps us to search the
exact bunch of tweets based on keywords, username, time period etc. Thus, we can filter the tweets very
easily.

For this research we have used the following two campaigns:

Phenko nahi jodo: The campaign "Phenko Nahin Jodo" was created for the adhesive product Fevikwik
from Pidilite. The product Fevikwik is low involvement. The ad campaign was created around "the value
of repair and reuse" in a humorous way. For this campaign, we have used #PhenkoNahiJodo, "Phenko
nahi jodo”,#Gappu and #Kabadiwali to filter the tweets.

Whopper Neutrality: To make people aware of net neutrality, Burger King has executed a campaign
called "Whopper Neutrality". In the campaign, the customer finds that if he/she buys the usual Whopper,
he/she has to wait to get the burger. And if the customer purchases a quick pass by giving an extra $20,
the customer will get quick delivery. This humorous take on net neutrality educated customers about net
neutrality by promoting the product - whopper. For this campaign, we have used #WhopperNeutrality,
"Whopper Neutrality" to filter the tweets.

After filtering the tweets, we used ScrapStorm Tool. This tool helps us to scrap the CSS data of the
website and arrange it in a tabular format as we need it. The scraped data set is then saved in an Excel file.

Data Processing

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The extracted data then has to be cleansed. The unique tweets have to be filtered, the URLs in the tweets
are removed. The emoticons are also removed from the tweets. Thus, the sample of both the campaign has
been created. Sample Size for the Fevikwik Campaign was a random sample of 105 unique tweets. Burger
King campaign we extracted a random sample of 134 unique tweets. Unique Tweets means the two
tweets don’t have the exact same text. Also, these tweets don’t include retweets but it includes quote
tweets. We also counted the frequency of each word so that, the word cloud can be made for the analysis
and visualization.

Data Analysis

Following this, we have analyzed the text using the sentiment analysis tool called "Twinword".
TwinWord uses lexicon-based sentiment analysis. Lexicon based sentiment analysis uses a dictionary-
based approach for scoring. The tool divides the sentence into words. Then it removes the stop words
(Words which don’t have any sentiment polarity eg. I, It’s, mine, etc.). The remaining words are then
mapped with the dictionary. Dictionary has words with the specific polarity of the word. This polarity
score gives weightage to the word’s sentiment. The polarity score is given between -1 to 1. The score for
each sentence is calculated by the average method. If the sentence sentiment score is between -0.05 to
0.05, then the sentence will be classified as Neutral. Below that score, it will be classified as Negative
otherwise Positive. After that, we analyzed every tweet and assign a sentiment score to the tweet. We also
analyzed the whole tweet data set. This sentiment score will give an overall picture of the positive or
negative sentiment of the campaign. Here it is important to note that, the words which are not in the
dictionary and also not in the stop word list are given sentiment score of zero. So, the word doesn’t get
any polarity and changes the sentiments.

The positive and negative sentiment analysis only gives half a picture. If the sentiment is happy, then the
consumer is happy, confident, or analytical. If they have negative sentiment than the tone is fearful, sad or
tentative. The question can be answered by the tone analyzer. The tone analyzer can be helpful in social
listening and audience monitoring. After the sentiment analysis, we also checked for the tone analysis of
the tweets to gather the overall tone of the extracted tweets. We used IBM Watson’s Tone Analyzer
Demo To analyze the tone of the data set for the campaigns. The tool calculates two types of tone:
Emotional Tones and Linguistic Tone. The Tone Analyzer of IBM Watson helps to classify the text
according to the tones (Joy, Anger, Analytical, Confident, Tentative, Fear, and Sadness).

Data Visualization

After the analysis, we have created the pie charts and. Bar graphs. In the end we created a word cloud
according to the word frequencies. More the frequency bigger the representation This was done using MS
Excel.

4 Fındıngs:

Phenko Nahi Jodo: After the Sentiment Analysis we found that from the tweet that, the sentiment score
for the data set extracted is 0.10359 according to Twinword tool, which is positive. This means that the
overall sentiment for the campaign among consumers is positive. The campaign gave an overall positive
impact on the brand according to the sentiment analysis done.

As shown in the Fig. 2., 45.70 per cent of the tweets were Positive (The sentiment score is above 0.05).
25.7% of the tweets were Negative (The sentiment score is below -0.05) and other were classified as
Neutral (The sentiment score is between -0.05 to 0.05). This proves that the humor in campaign increase
the positive attitude in customers. Also, according to Fig. 3. histogram, it is cler that the positive tweets

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are overpowering the negative tweets.

The IBM Watson Tone analyzer gave the tone of Joy with a score of 0.64 out of 1.0, which is higher. This
means that writers of the tweets are content, satisfied and sense of enjoyment. This validates the purpose
of the Fevikwik’s Phenko Nahin Jodo campaign.

The word cloud (Fig. 4) which is created using the tweets gives the important keywords around the
campaigns. These keywords are "Phenko", "Nahi", "Jodo", "Repair", "Reuse", "Kabadiwali", "Fevikwik",
"Pidilite", etc. The Brand "Fevikwik" and company "Pidilite" got the recall value from the campaign.

Figure 2. Fevikwik "Phenko Nahi Jodo" Sentiments by number of tweets

Figure 3. Histogram of Number of tweets according to Sentiment Score for Phenko Nahi Jodo
Campaign

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Figure 4. Word Cloud for the campaign "Phenko Nahi Jodo"

Whopper Neutrality: As shown in the Fig. 5., the sentiment score for the Whopper Neutrality campaign
was 0.22263. This means that the sentiment for the campaign is positive (The sentiment score is above
0.05). The percentage of Positive Tweets is 64.2%. Negative (The sentiment score is below -0.05) tweets
are only 6%. And the rest are neutral (The sentiment score is between -0.05 to 0.05). Also, according to
Fig. 6. histogram, it is clear that the positive tweets are overpowering the negative tweets.

The Tone analyzer gave the tone of Joy with a score of 0.61 and analytical score 0.64 out of 1.0, This
means that writers of the tweets are content, satisfied and sense of enjoyment. Also, the some of the
tweets appreciates the marketing efforts by the brand, so it got an analytical score of 0.64.

The word cloud (Fig. 7) which is created using the tweets gives the important keywords around the
campaigns. "Whopper", "Net", "Neutrality", "Burger King", "Marketing", "Burger" etc.

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Figure 5. Burger King "Whopper Neutrality" Sentiments by number of tweets

Figure 6. Histogram of Number of tweets according to Sentiment Score for Whopper Neutrality
Campaign

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Figure 7. Word Cloud for the campaign "Whopper Neutrality

Other Findings:

The Phenko Nahi Jodo campaign has tweets in Hindi. These tweets did not get any sentiment score by the
TwinWord Tool. Also, the IBM Watson Tone Analyzer also didn’t capture any tone for the same tweets.
The same happened in the Whopper Neutrality campaign. There were some tweets in Mandarin Chinese
Language in the data set. But the tools didn’t assign any score to the tweets. Thus, the tweet classified as a
neutral tweet. People also have used some internet slang in the tweet. Those words are also not used in
calculating the sentiment score.

5 Lımıtatıons:

There are a few limitations in the study that is conducted. The tools used for sentiment analysis is still
very primitive and basic. During the sentiment analysis, we found that the algorithm behind the sentiment
analysis doesn't incorporate and properly analyze sarcasm or double negative sentences or contextual
sentiment.

Also, there were many tweets that are in Indian vernacular languages. But the sentiment analysis
algorithms are not developed for Indian vernacular languages. So, the research for the campaigns is only
restricted to a few European languages. The tool also didn’t give sentiment score to the internet language
called slang. The internet language (slang) or emoticons doesn’t get any sentiment score in the research.

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The major limitation of the study was the data extraction limitation. The research was limited to Twitter
data. Comments from YouTube, Facebook or other platforms are not considered

6 Conclusıon:

Both campaign study shows that there is a positive sentiment in people's opinion if the advertising is
humorous. The tone analysis also helped to validate the findings from the sentiment analysis. The tweets
were taken randomly across a year to check the impact of humor in advertising and brand recall. Thus,
both the campaign analyses show the resounding impact on brand equity. With the results, we can
conclude that the humor in advertising is a very lucrative avenue for the brand to change the perception of
brand among the consumers. It increases the positive sentiment about the campaign and brand among
consumers. The humor in advertising creates a recall for the brand, and impact the brand equity. The
Sentiment analysis for this type of campaign can help to monitor the overall sentiment and mood of the
consumer.

7 Future Scope:

During our research, we have uncovered areas that were not within the scope. Many of them are
interesting problem statement for further studies. The future scope of the research can be on the topic of
how these types of campaign impact on the parameters like revenue and sales.[15] Also, there are
different types of humor. To look at which type of humor works best for the brands to different objectives
like brand recall, purchase intention, brand perception, etc. can be a very interesting topic for further
research. Other than this, different types of products [16][17] that are more benefited with the humor in
advertising and which are the products where humor actually harm the image, this can also be the future
research avenue. Different type of humor may work differently on different online platform like Snapchat,
Instagram, YouTube, Facebook etc. A unique research can be beneficial for the digital marketer to create
content. Different communities, different ethnic groups may have different taste in humor.[18][19] What
things should a marketer take note of while making an online ad with humor for different groups using
sentiment analysis can also be research scope.

In the research we have used only lexicon-lexicon based sentiment analysis. Other methods of sentiment
analysis, like Naïve Bayer Classifier Method, deep neural networks or any machine learning techniques
can be explored.[20][21]

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