Marketers regularly lose their nights’ sleep over how to target young millennials. They run Snapchat campaigns, get Twitter influencers to tweet for them, and even pick up hip new lingo. But millennials are a strange bunch, and go where their youthful hearts desire.
And the latest object of their fancy is the 94 year old CEO of MDH.
Dharampal Gulati, the sprightly CEO of the Rs. 1,500 crore masala company, has become a bit of an internet sensation. Gultati, of course, was born before the internet existed. He’s been around since before computers, cars, and even the word meme itself, which was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976. But thanks to MDH’s long-running TV ads, with their accompanying catchy jingle, the MDH man is currently all over the internet.
A parody page, simply called MDH, but bearing no connection with the masala company, has been churning out memes featuring the MDH man in increasingly outrageous situations. So he’s jamming with Justin Beiber, chilling with Rajnikanth, and somewhat disturbingly, also in the Avataar Universe. At the end of each surreal interaction, he offers his hapless recipient some of his famed MDH masale.
And sometimes memes go meta. He’s also with fellow meme sensation, the Trivago man.
He hangs out with Dhinchak Pooja as well.
It’s pretty silly humour (with some undeniably impressive photoshop work), but it works. The page has managed to gather 18,000 fans in super quick time, and its 18 year old creator, Anshuman Tyagi is ecstatic. “I wanted to come up with new kinds of memes. And while I was thinking, the MDH Masale ad came up on TV, and I was like ‘Wait a minute'” Anshuman told ScoopWhoop. “I mean Chachaji also deserves to be talked about, no?”
MDH, of course, has been running its iconic commercials on TV since before Tyagi was born, and their appeal clearly seems to span generations. The fact that an 18 year old relates with an ad that was made decades ago shows that authenticity works — Dharampal Gulati is the CEO and owner of MDH, holding nearly 80% of the company, and him appearing to TV to promote his own products evokes a sense of old world charm and nostalgia. The repetition helps too — running the same jingle for years and years clearly creates some sort of bond. And millennials have adapted his presence in the way the know best — through memes.