It is funny. It is filmi. And it is focussed. One can have a good laugh every time one sees it. This is the latest Motorola ad.

The brand is Motorokr. It depicts a series of very filmi situations — one shows the mother praying in a temple for her lost son. And the son arrives! The second could be a scene from Mughal-e-Azam, and the third looks straight out of Deewar. In the climax, the scene depicts a death in the family, ladies in white are crying and suddenly the dead body draped in white cloth and red tika on the forehead breaks into a dance.

In each of these sequences the hero breaks into a dance. The music that provokes the dances can’t be heard. That makes the movements appear even more hilarious. The actor is none other than the B who is getting bigger by the minute — Abhishek Bachchan.

What’s so great about the ad? Arguably humour is the greatest hooker in advertising. The downside is that with humour, from class to crass is a very small step. It can easily misfire. That is why successful rendition of humour, like in this ad, deserves to be hailed. This ad has acquired two very rare qualities — it entertains and therefore is remembered by the consumer. Secondly, the ad bears repeat-viewing well — something that usually media-planners insist and consumers resent. Finally, it is single-minded. Through all the stories it plugs music, the selling point of the phone.

There are two other important issues. Unlike bargain stores, the world of brand-marketing is forever searching for ways to enhance value. Attempts by marketers to add value expectedly centres on the product or its image. Better looks of a brand of pen, higher mileage of a new car or smoother drag of a brand of smoke. Marketers of mobile handsets have chosen to move off the beaten track. They asked themselves — why should the added value on offer be necessarily linked to the original product?

The pundits have their views but so far the answer from the consumer has been — Yeah, sure. They lapped up the add-on of music players or video cameras offered as parts of a handset. This ad of a mobile phone does not waste a single frame on how good the phone is.

The second issue is a trickier one. Have you noticed the series of ads that Abhishek Bachchan has chosen to do recently? Remember the other Motorola ad where he pushes his phone to the girl in the bar with a come-hither message. Or the one where the morning paper carries, instead of his close-up, the photograph of the phone he was launching. Or the one where he lands up in the car dealer’s show room in the early hours of the morning and screams — but you said tomorrow two o’clock. They have a common thread — all are smart, witty and entertaining. And in all of them the star plays himself.

Is there a reverse swing here? Instead of brands borrowing from his image, are the brands unobtrusively etching a desired image of Abhishek in our minds?