Published on
May 7, 2024
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Welcome to the Breakdown, a weekly roundup of the best real-life marketing examples, created for marketers and agency folk that want to create work that actually works.
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In this Breakdown, we're looking at ✨ humour ✨ - how ads making you laugh might make them more effective. Humour has made a bit of comeback in advertising - but such a broad generalisation feels like it needs some proof.
More than half of the winners in the 2023 Cannes Lions Film category were intentionally funny, up from 43% in 2022. The awards show even added a new Humour category for 2024. Plus, research from Oracle indicates that 90% of consumers are more likely to remember a funny ad, with 72% showing a preference for humorous brands over their competitors. Kantar and System1 have also found similar conclusions. Even though that research sounds insane, there you go.
A joke only gets funnier the more you say it
Mike’s Hard Lemonade (which I learned today is actually a flavoured malt beverage) launched a new campaign featuring two new characters: Hank and Joel, convenience store clerks, are the brand’s gatekeepers. They decide whether or not someone has had a hard enough day to deserve the refreshing taste of Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
There are three spots featuring a firefighter, a delivery guy who has been mauled by a tiny dog, and an American football mascot who has been accidentally nailed by a running back, each prove to the deadpan duo of Hank and Joel that they do, in fact, deserve a lemonade.
The three ads are nearly identical, and I think that works in their favour. For once, I’d firmly place myself in the Byron Sharp camp of I think genuinely funny things are just much more memorable than less funny things. Mike’s repeat the joke three times → you remember the funny anecdotes therein, and maybe you remember the whole thing is tying back to needing some refreshment after a hard day’s work. You might also remember you can buy Mike’s in most convenience stores. Mental availability, physical availability, purchase.
This ‘voice in the back of your head’ is even creepier than Voldemort in the first Harry Potter movie, though.
Of Philomena Cunk fame, comedian Diane Morgan becomes the voice in the back of a woman’s head, literally. In the 30-second spot, a woman sits down on her sofa with a bowl of Graze. “Mmm, Graze Chilli and Lime Crunch.”
But the voice in the back of her head (talking out of a mouth formed from the woman's hair) speaks up. “Don't even think about it. Graze makes healthy snacks. AKA, bleurgh...” The two argue. The woman eats the snack.
“Don't listen to the voice in the back of your head.”
This ad is proof that you don’t actually need to be funny. You can borrow someone else’s funny. People typically talk about influencers for their reach, but their ability to be funny in a way that isn’t cringe can be very valuable. In this case, just Diane Morgan’s voice alone is funny enough to carry what is, let’s be honest, a pretty vanilla attempt at humour. That isn’t me having a dig, though - humour is a tool to aid memory, not a litmus test for your tight 5 at a stand-up show that, I promise you, none of your friends want to come to.
I will now be writing into my will that I would like to be doused in Chanel Bleu if there’s to be an open casket.
Lynx released two, 2-minute, darkly humourous films this week. In “Robbery”, a woman holding up a restaurant with a hammer falls for a waiter wearing Lynx. The two flee the scene with the cash. In “Funeral”, sobbing funeral attendees parade around an open casket. One mourner is so intoxicated by the fact that the corpse is wearing Lynx, that she crawls into the coffin, claiming she has fallen in love because he smells so good.
The ads don’t read well when summarised, so give them a watch...
But they are funny. There’s an art-house-black-comedy-serialised-on-Netflix vibe to them, like ‘The End Of The F***ing World’. But before we get into how the comedy is working, see what LOLA MullenLowe executive creative director Tomás Ostiglia had to say:
“We know there will be die-hard fans of the campaign, and there will also be offended individuals. What we try here is pushing humor to the extreme, always aiming to be faithful to the ideas, and trying to forget the fear that comes with making certain jokes. The filter we chose was to ask ourselves at every step: ‘Is it funnier this way?’ And if the answer was a laugh, we went ahead with it.
The casting, also somewhat inspired by the style of the series Sex Education, created this extraordinary universe of people who look normal and act authentically but with that touch of comedy, far from the stereotypes often seen in advertising.”
Nice.
Ok, so what is the comedy doing here? Yes it makes the ads memorable. But is that really important?
On a pragmatic, boring level - where would you see these, so that you’d remember them? They’re supposedly running digitally and in cinema in the UK, Turkey, Mexico, Argentina and Uruguay. For their length and production value, cinema makes total sense. These are the kind of ads you’d search for after the movie. And cinema media salespeople will talk your ear off about the unparalleled ad attention they can achieve. Plus, I suppose if any long-form online ad is going to pique your interest and get you to watch them, these spots could do it. But for the ambition of these ads, this feels like a limited roll-out - and maybe it is a test bed. So we’ll wait to see how this pans out, and if more work or cut-downs follow.
But on another, perhaps more relevant level, Lynx have always been a funny brand. Their ads have always been funny (some haven’t aged particularly well), and people have come to expect it from them, like Pepperami or Skittles. Lynx also have a funny place in British culture: the Lynx gift sets for Christmas, the nostalgia of locker rooms. The brand has needed to grow up from its funny associations with smelly teens, and this kind of humour fits the bill. It’s silly but serious.
All of this means that it’s a pointless question to try to extrapolate too many sweeping learnings. There are so few brands that could have taken this approach, because they’re just not funny enough. But one thing I’d take is from Tomás Ostiglia’s words: “there will be die-hard fans of the campaign, and there will also be offended individuals”. This campaign is not meant to get everyone to laugh and love Lynx. Much like segmentation, targeting and positioning, humour is an exclusionary strategy. It cannot be for the people who don’t get it. Sadly it’s far less scientific than, for instance, segmenting the market. So if you produce a really, really unfunny ad, you might not have as easy a defence as you might hope.