Zomato has found a rather unconventional way to talk to HR professionals: blame the HR department.
A new Zomato ad doing the rounds on LinkedIn opens with the line “Our HR doesn’t work” a headline that sounds less like advertising and more like an employee complaint waiting to happen. But the visual quickly reveals the joke: the ad features Niharika Mohanty, HR Head at Zomato.
The creative uses the apparent HR fail as a way into a very different conversation food reimbursements and employee meal benefits.
The proposition sits around Zomato for Enterprise, with the brand highlighting how businesses can manage meal benefits for employees through its platform. Rather than leading with the usual product-heavy explanation, however, Zomato has chosen to make the HR leader herself the hook.
And that is where the ad gets its attention.
The headline initially creates the impression that Zomato is making a very serious admission about its own HR function. The reveal turns it into a workplace joke, making the communication instantly legible without needing much explanation.
For Zomato, it is another example of using self-aware workplace humour to sell a B2B proposition. Instead of speaking to HR teams in corporate language about benefits administration, the brand starts with the kind of line that might actually make an HR professional stop scrolling.
The punchline may be about HR. The pitch, however, is about making employee food benefits easier to manage.
