Festivals represent a growing sector of leisure industries, where competition is vast. Thus, festival managers are increasingly adopting business-like approaches, including branding. We conducted a qualitative study and considered the branding of Finnish festival, Porispere, a unique case, providing an interesting example to learn more about the usefulness of ironic humour in branding. Data gathered from social media, as well as Porispere’s promotional material and interviews with the festival managers were content-analyzed for the study. The findings indicate that the use of irony in festival branding increase stakeholders ‘attention and awareness of the festival, increase media attention, and thus create brand awareness for the festival in cost-efficient way. The use of irony also activates stakeholders to co-creation of brand identity. The study contributes to the academic literature on brand co-creation by demonstrating the use of irony as a way to engage stakeholders to brand co-creation. However, ironic branding may be also risky: succeeding in it requires the art of balancing between boldness and appropriateness.