One of the other speakers at the conference I addressed last week suggested that humour could work in advertising. He had a big ad agency background.
Predictably, everybody loved the funny adverts he screened and all agreed that, yes, humour works.
But does it?
The famous Paula Hamilton ad for the VW golf was amusing (but possibly not if you were a woman who’d just been (metaphorically) screwed by your fiancee); and as it focused on the core “reliability” message that VW have been pursuing for years, could be argued to be consistent with VW’s overall sales message.
Did it “work”? Well, that depends on our definition of “work”. If you take as true the premise that car advertising is actually aimed at existing owners (explained to me once by a senior industry brand strategist), it probably did, inasmuch as it made them feel happy with their car and pleased to be associated with cool advertising.
Did it shift more Golfs? We’ll never know, because the ads weren’t trackable and, in any case, car sales are influenced by a huge range of other channels, not least the whole dealer network and the influential motoring press.
Let’s talk about direct response advertising instead. Here, I think, the evidence is clearer. No, humour doesn’t work. Not in the broad, Smash Martians-Benson and Hedges way, at any rate. The Economist, famously, uses humour of a very dry variety in its above the line campaigns, but its direct marketing is a humour-free zone.
When people are thinking of spending money, they tend to be in a serious frame of mind. They want to know, “what’s in it for me?” and, “what if it all goes wrong?” and that’s about it. The jokes can wait.