Humor in Advertising

Humor. We love it. We use it. Humor is universal. There are roughly between

6000 and 7000 dialects spoken in the world but you don’t need to be a linguist to

recognize when someone is laughing.

Humor gets our attention – although in some ways better than others. There are many of us that have different tastes in humor so you must be careful when you use it to hit the right audience with it. Advertising uses humor to get our attention and I believe humor in advertising is one effective means of doing so. According to a study 69% percent of the ads having the highest impact, are ads using humor. Yet another study showed that humor in advertising, while impactful, does not translate into motivating the consumer into buying. This makes sense to me. What I believe is the strongest motivator to get people into buying what the ad promotes is the benefit to the consumer. Not just money savors as many ads promote but other benefits like good security, health, communication, and transportation. Also some other good promoting attributes such as: increased esteem, confidence, excitement, comfort, and care.

It’s perfectly fine that the advertising industry uses humor in its ads. “Depending on the medium, anywhere from 10% to 30% of all advertisements use humor.” (Weinberger, Spotts, Campbell, & Parsons, 1995) This implies that many advertisers believe that humor improves advertisement effectiveness. Humor makes ads at least fun and more interesting to read, if not in depth, then at least quickly. 

A very effective ad that used humor was the Telus ad for their Share Plus Plans that included some benefits. It was recently a full page ad in the Ottawa Sun that showed a giant Hippo sitting on a telephone pole with three colourful birds sitting on the pole to its right. The headline explained: Heavyweight plan, Featherweight commitment. Then it listed three benefits to the Telus Share Plus Plans. It was quite bold but very effective in my opinion. Much better than a typical car ad that is jammed packed with content that makes your head spin and you are at the point where you don’t know where to start reading.

The Telus ad was good, however humor in advertising is generally tough to produce effectively and well. In fact a poorly executed ad campaign can insult people, and even do damage to its brand. An example of this was the advertising campaign for the Mic Mac Mall. Many people got offended by it’s messages that were meant to be interpreted lightly and humorously.

Is it worth taking those risks to make a humorous ad? Well in general its common knowledge to know the difference between what is offensive and what is humorous. There are many comedians who push the envelope though. However in advertising I would say if you stay away from touchy subjects then it’s worth the risk to put out a humorous ad.

With an ad that is meant to be funny not everyone will be on board, because you simply can’t please everyone and make everyone laugh. In general a younger audience will be laughing more often and an older audience will laugh less. However if you get a large portion of the target audience to be on board and laugh with you then you’ll hit a winner.