I’ve been working in Advertising for 15 years and in the last few I’ve noticed a trend that is worth discussing, why did we all get so serious? Most of my favorite ads, as a human or consumer, not as an advertising professional, made me laugh or at least smile. It seems to me that in the past 10 years or so, brands have gotten more and more serious. One of my favorite ads growing up in Italy, that I still remember perfectly, was for a paintbrush: Pennello Cinghiale. It wasn’t necessarily funny, a little quirky, but it made me smile and I will always remember it for it:
The punch line, poorly translated, is “for big jobs, you don’t need a big paintbrush, you need a great paintbrush!” It’s not Laugh Out Loud funny, but it always made me chuckle.
Another ad I will never forget is the Cadbury Gorilla. An ad so nonsensical that it should have never been made, but it works so perfectly, you couldn’t ignore it if you tried. It’s epic nonsense of the highest order, with an epic song, and an epic twist:
So I did what anyone with a highly scientific approach to understanding the world would do, I asked Twitter for help:
I got a lot of great responses, definitely worth reading them to discover some real gems and reminding yourself that Advertising can be truly wonderful. There’s a British slant to the responses as I seem to be “very” popular with UK based Advertising Twitterers, but overall two themes emerged:
Ads with catchy jingles stand the test of time
Ads that use Humor/Wit/Playfulness are remembered fondly
The former is a really interesting one that some of my favorite Advertising Twitter friends have been writing about for a while (Jake Sanders, Faris Yakob, and Ant Henderson) and I also believe is an important one for our industry to bring back. I’m not a musician, you can ask any of my music teachers from when I was a child, it’s best for all of us that I stopped trying, but even I can fully recognize the power of Sonic Branding in advertising.
The latter is something that’s closer to my heart, humor, or at the very least, the ability to make someone smile. It’s one of the most powerful things humans can do, make someone else happy if even for a second.
As I looked back, I realized both these things have faded somewhat from advertising, and I started wondering if this was true or just my personal bias. In doing some research I found this telling chart from Kantar:
From: Who’s laughing now? Let’s stop the decline of humour in advertising
There seems to have been a direct impact of the Global Recession and the Pandemic on these numbers, with brands choosing to tread carefully during difficult times. This indicates that the real drop has been in “light hearted” ads, with “Funny” ones always making up less than 20%. I find this particularly telling, being funny is really hard, but being lighthearted isn’t nearly as hard, why have we moved away from it? Is it really because brands didn’t want to seem insensitive during hard times? That would explain dips right around the Recession and the Pandemic, not the overall trend. More on this later.
The paradox is that Kantar also notes how while only 33% of the ads they research incorporate some form of humor, half of their Kantar Creative Effectiveness Award winners use it. Humor works, it makes advertising more effective!
We have plenty of evidence that ads are usually ignored and that the best we should be aiming for is for our ads to be noticed, let alone remembered. Some of my favorite ads in recent years have been ones that either made me laugh or smile, for example Progressive’s ongoing Dr. Rick series. I look forward to the next episode and get really excited when a new one drops.
Counter point though are Liberty Mutual’s ads, which try really hard to be funny but are mostly not. Insurance might be a bad example because it seems, from the outside, that since all brands/services are the same they flood us with ads that at an insane frequency to keep Awareness high and don’t care too much how they land. Nonetheless, the ones that are truly funny do stand out.
So why have brands abandoned humor?
Like I said, being funny is hard, really hard. If you try too hard and bomb, people will let you know, especially today’s social media addicted consumers. We’ve all seen the spate of celebrity stuffed Super Bowl ads this year trying really hard to be funny. Not many succeeded. The things is, ads don’t need to be “laugh out loud” funny or very serious, it’s not binary, they can be witty, make you smile, or just be endearing.
While it may be true that right around very difficult moments, like the Recession, and, checks notes, every week the past 3 years, brands should avoid slapstick humor, I think the real reason we’ve become so serious is something else entirely: we’ve started taking ourselves, our brands, our work, and everything we produce way too seriously.
Whether drunk on brand purpose, inspired by the “Like a Girl” or “Real Beauty” campaigns of the world, or inebriated by the idea that all brands need to be premium and aspirational, we’ve started churning out cookie cutter manifesto ads left and right. We suddenly started believing that consumers really do love brands and care about what brands stand for. That a brand’s role is not to sell things to consumers but to empower their dreams and espouse their causes. (Ironically, I actually do care about what brands do, I do my best to buy from businesses that have decent practices around how they treat employees, their environmental impact, etc., but I’m part of a very small minority that has the disposable income to act this way. This is also a topic I care a lot about and will tackle another time, it’s too serious and depressing for today’s newsletter)
We decided that people needed our ads to inspire them, to move them, to make them get off their couches and do something meaningful with their little lives! Whether this stemmed from our inescapable guilt at being cogs in the Consumerist Machine, the struggle of artists that are working for said Machine instead of making, you know, art, or just from forgetting that we are not the consumer, it needs to stop. The sea of sameness of “inspiring” 30, or even worse, 90 second ads is maddening, no consumer buys it and it doesn’t work.
Sure, there are a few brands that can believably release incredibly inspiring ads that people watch and are moved by, which in turn make them buy stuff from these brands. Most of us though, we work on brands that at best are sort of liked by the consumers we target, and, repeat after me, that’s OK. Whether we’re selling shoes or sunglasses my friend, we’re not inspiring anyone to do anything incredible with their lives every day, accept it, embrace it, and move on.
Why I’m Skeptical.
The world has been in a really shitty place for years now, and 2022 isn’t looking to buck the trend. A recession is either upon us or already happening, no one seems to know, but typically this pushes brands to cut ad spends, get more serious and focus a lot more on sales than on trying to make people smile. Brands will also be even more weary of appearing insensitive in difficult times, and the temptation to churn out another 30 seconds of inspiring humans doing inspiring things to sell a car will always be very strong. I’ve seen with my own eyes clients working on brands that should be proud to offer decent products at good value shooting down fun ideas because they weren’t “premium enough”. I haven’t seen much evidence that this is going to change any time soon, but I hope I’m wrong. Customer orientation we hardly knew thee.
Why I’m Optimistic.
The most successful brands are the ones that really understand who they are in the minds of consumers, not who they would like to be. Snickers isn’t trying to solve world hunger, it’s a delicious peanut and chocolate snack that really hits the spot when you’re hungry. They know it and have had a lot of fun with it, making some consistently funny ads, and some truly great ones:
Hopefully more brand teams and agencies can look at themselves in the metaphorical mirror and realize that being so serious all the time isn’t good for business. Similar to the movie business, tearjerkers and moody films may win awards, but it’s funny movies and camp superheroes that win at the box office. A script about a family overcoming adversity and finding the meaning of life while hiking a mountain wearing your shoes might give you chills when read by a charismatic Creative Director in a dimly lit meeting room (or a dimly lit Zoom call), but consider whether any consumer who is barely paying attention or actively avoiding your ad will care or even remember. There’s nothing wrong about being fun, not taking yourself too seriously, it works for humans, why wouldn’t it work for brands? We know it does, so do more of it.
Serendipitously, while I was contemplating the demise of humor in advertising, I discovered the work of Paddy Gilmore, who runs a consultancy helping brands be funnier. He was recently a guest on the excellent podcast Let’s Talk Branding by Stef Hamerlinck and shared some really useful ways to think about humor in advertising:
Paddy has a great newsletter on Brands and humor that I highly recommend if you want to learn how to use more humor in your campaigns: