By Tarek Sioufi, Chief Strategy Officer, Grey London
Suddenly, more of the world wants to laugh. Or so it may seem. After many fallow years, when humour in advertising felt scarce, misplaced, or just absent – it’s slowly, tentatively making a comeback. A wealth of new studies (Oracle, Kantar, among others) have evidenced its effectiveness in making communications more memorable and impactful. Creatives who have bemoaned its absence are starting to cheer its return. And Cannes has inevitably gotten in on the act, with 2024 being the inaugural year for its Lion for humour.
Yet despite these tentative steps, humour remains woefully underused. The industry still has the handbrake on, and there are two culprits that explain why. Firstly, there’s an issue with who is – and who isn’t – using humour.
The Usual Suspects
For years it’s been wielded by the usual suspects: food and drink brands, the occasional mobile provider, and the world of personal care – have tended to own a large share of laughter. FMCG became the poster child for humour, while other categories – who arguably needed it most – have been reluctant to wield it.
As a rule, many of the sectors tackling life’s biggest problems – healthcare, financial services, and especially B2B – have been relatively humourless. They tend to default to highly rational messages that focus on the performance of their products and services, and the severity of the issues their clients face. This has often made for logical advertising, but not compelling storytelling.
Many of the largest businesses (by market value) and most visible categories (by growth) have shirked humour. While this remains the case, they will struggle to win share of mind in a meme-filled world where laughter is one of our most share-able, and distinct currencies.
Humour is a Weapon
The second issue is that humour has often been thought about by marketers in the wrong way. It’s interesting to note how Cannes describes its new category. They say they will award the best use of ‘wit and satire to provide amusement.’ This is a sensible description of humour in general, but not of humour in advertising. In day-to-day life, humour is an amusement. In advertising, it’s a weapon.
It’s not simply for laughs, it’s a means of addressing real business problems..
Revitalizing Purpose
The death of brand purpose has been highly exaggerated. But make no mistake, purpose is under threat – from activist investors to own brands. Marketers and consumers increasing beef with purpose is often down to this – simple, everyday products riding the coattails of big, serious, life-or-death issues.
But just as important is how these issues are often presented: a po-faced, earnest VO, with the tonality of a church service. I believe much of purpose’s decline is due to brands taking themselves too seriously. This puts purpose in an awkward place in a world hungrier than ever to be entertained, and where endless doom scrolling through the news means the coping mechanism of humour is more essential than ever.
Our latest campaign for Aquafresh was based on research by Haleon that found school-age kids often experience low confidence due to their teeth, but we didn’t dramatise the issue. Instead we created a light-hearted campaign to celebrate every child’s smile, no matter how crooked, fangy, or gap-filled.
When we shared this work with the most important audience – kids – they felt uplifted and empowered, instead of being made to feel like victims or outcasts.
Standing out in a sea of sameness
If you’ve got time, and a very high pain threshold, I invite you to spend a few hours looking at a variety of FS advertising. What you will find – regardless of market – is a flood of logic-based advertising talking about that most emotional of subjects: money.
This is part of the broader sea of sameness we see in many ‘serious’ categories. In many instances providers have startlingly similar product lines, offers – and compound this by using similar marketing approaches – on everything from visual codes to messaging.
Humour needs to be leveraged more in these categories, not simply to make people laugh, but because we know it’s more effective at driving distinctiveness.
Demystifying complex categories
In speaking with several clients in highly complex categories – think cybersecurity, insurance, or wealth management – they bemoan how challenging it can be to achieve simplicity while operating in such tricky spaces.
Instead of fighting the complexity, many marketers give into it – producing messages that can feel more like tutorials than brand experiences. But when humour is used in these categories, another superpower is revealed: demystifying complexity.
It can do this whether it’s explaining a sophisticated product feature for a gaming company or making B2B legal practice management engaging. As businesses in sophisticated categories look to gain share of mind and wallet – humour will be a vital tool to simplify messages, memorably introducing them to new audiences.
How to make the change
All this said, no brand can instantly pivot from one tone of voice to another. If you’ve built years of equity as a serious brand in a serious category, suddenly throwing jokes into your ads will reek of inauthenticity, confuse your customers, and fail to have the intended impact.
Ultimately, humour takes care. Essential to this is ‘the dance’ – the back and forth between client and agencies – as they revel in the tension between being brand guardian and brand provocateur.
There is risk in humour. But there is also risk in failing to use it. Humour is not just haha. It’s a business weapon – there to build distinctiveness, cut through complexity, and breathe new life into the moribund world of purpose.
So go ahead, do it. Take yourself a little less seriously.
