How a Jungle Hero Helped SEEK Own the Spotlight

Humor. It’s one of advertising’s most divisive topics, largely because it walks a very fine line between clever and catastrophic.

Get it right, and it can grab attention, trigger emotion, and seed memorable impressions. Get it wrong, and the brand either gets lost in the pursuit of laughs (limiting its ability to build branded memories,) or the joke doesn’t strike the intended chord—getting a large swathe of the target audience offside in the process.

But if there’s one thing we’ve learnt over the years from testing countless comical creatives across the globe, it’s that when humor is closely entwined with a memorable story—that clearly emphasizes the brand and its key proposition—it becomes advertising manna from heaven. And SEEK’s latest campaign is a textbook example of what it takes to get the job done.

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The storyline was simple: a loincloth-wearing Tarzan casually chats with an unexpected colleague, explaining (using everyday corporate lingo) how he’s just found a new role he’d be perfectly suited for… King of the Jungle, of course.

While the surreal juxtaposition of Tarzan in an office drew viewers’ attention from the get-go, it was the unfolding joke of Tarzan being just like any other white-collar worker in their professional pursuits which is what absorbed people in the story. What’s more, the dead-pan delivery of the two characters bouncing off each other was highly attuned to Australians’ typically dry sense of humor. This combined effortlessly with the unexpected visual setting to create a highly enjoyable ad with few adverse effects by way of annoyance or irritation.

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Perhaps most importantly, though, what took the ad from good to great didn’t just relate to it making viewers smile. Instead, it was the clarity and simplicity with which the brand was embedded into the storyline.

Too often, jokes in advertising are allowed to overshadow the product or message. But for SEEK, centering the entire narrative around the character finding his dream job through the employment website’s app (and delivering each joke as a nod to the ease in which job-benefits could be found,) meant there was no way SEEK could be lost in the comedy. What’s more, introducing the brand’s logo and signature colors during the final punchline served as the cherry on top, ensuring SEEK was present at the exact moment people’s brains were at their most engaged with the storyline.

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By eliminating the need for complicated mental gymnastics to identify the brand within the joke, SEEK’s new campaign ticked all the right boxes for successfully building branded memories: creative cut-through, emotional engagement, and indelible linkage. In short, it’s storytelling at its most efficient, and a great demonstration of the tremendous power of humor when delivered right.