Not sweet, but salty, spicy and tangy can be best used to describe the taste of Pass Pass Pulse. Seldom is a candy associated with these flavours, but DS Group’s confectionary brand Pulse has managed to make its mark in the market. The bite-sized candies, filled with a zesty core made of Indian spices, clocked Rs.3 billion in sales, within two years of its launch in 2016. Naturally, to advertise this unconventional candy, the campaigns have stood out from the rest.

In its newest commercial, the brand has opted for stick figures to convey the irresistibility of the candy. “We wanted to appeal to the young audience, and digital being the primary medium, we wanted simple, short and snackable content,” says Ashish Bhargava, deputy general manager – marketing, DS Group.

Conceptualised by Wunderman Thompson, the video shows a woman confronting her husband about a missing Pulse candy. When he lies about not having seen it anywhere, his wife reminds him that they are stick figures and she can clearly see that he is trying to hide the candy behind his pencil-thin back. As she chases him with a rolling pin in her hand, the ad ends with the iconic catchphrase, ‘Pran jaye par Pulse na jaye’.

While not many confectionery brands are using this format, giving Pulse an advantage in terms of recall and repeat watching, it was not an easy task to create the film, says Aastha Bhatnagar, account director, Wunderman Thompson, India. “Once a frame has been made and animated, any small change will apply to all the frames. And, since you have 24 frames in a second, the process becomes cumbersome,” she explains.

What looks like a 15-second ad, is two months of hard work, which has paid off. With nearly 13 million views on YouTube, the numbers are bound to increase as the campaign progresses. “The present ad was created keeping in mind that we will own this execution style over a period of time,” says Bhatnagar. Now, we cannot stop thinking about what the brand has up its sleeves.