What’s the secret ingredient of funny ads? And some of the best examples

Consider the gorilla. Cadbury struck advertising gold in 2007 with its Dairy Milk ad featuring a drummer in a monkey suit playing along to Phil Collins‘s In The Air Tonight. But was it, you know, haha funny?

Certainly, says Angela Seits, managing director of strategy and insights at PMG. And Seits has the brain scans to prove it – or at least, bods at neuro-marketing agency Neuro-Insight do.

“You can actually see objectively that that ad did register as funny,” Seits says. “It lights up the brain‘s reward system and the prefrontal cortex. There‘s been all this testing of that ad and why it‘s so memorable: the way that it builds intrigue, and then you‘re surprised when the gorilla hits the drum so low. It just lights up the brain.

“I think it‘s interesting because we think of humor as being so subjective. But there are also measures of how that humor hits – to the point of understanding whether it‘s witty or whether it‘s actually making you have that deep belly laugh.”

Alastair Mills, joint executive creative director at Impero, agrees. “There‘s a big difference between something that‘s kind of light-hearted and amusing to watch versus something that genuinely makes you laugh out loud,” he says.

On the question of the gorilla, though, he thinks differently. “I think it‘s a brilliant, brilliant ad,” he says. “But I don‘t think it‘s funny by any stretch of the imagination. It’s interesting and whimsical and sort of absurd. It’s that thing where if you put someone in a room by themselves and make them watch something that lots of people call funny – do they laugh when they’re not surrounded by people?”

One marketer’s synapse-connecting chortle is another’s whimsy, it would seem. And that’s before we discuss dumb humor.

Get your rocks off

Mills points to the recent Reese’s Caramel Big Cup ad as an example of the space the Super Bowl provides for brilliance in advertising. “I‘ve watched it about eight times in a row because there‘s something new to see in it every time,” he says. “It‘s just utter, silly nonsense. But it‘s the kind of thing that you can just watch again and again. There‘s so much product porn in it as well, weirdly. And yet, it‘s still hilarious.”

Ned Harvey, creative copywriter at AgencyUK, raises the lesser-known example of Leslie Neilson promoting Red Rock cider in an ad from 1990.

“The joke per second rate is just absolutely through the roof,” he explains. “You’re being whacked over the head for the full minute in this very Leslie Neilson style – joke after joke after joke. And then it comes to the end with a really dumb tagline. Because it’s Red Rock cider, it’s: ‘it‘s not red, and there are no rocks in it.’”

The Drum Network members also gave notable mentions for the use of dumb humor to Liquid Death, Snickers and Cinzano.

All of which might have brought tears to the eyes of Claude Hopkins. Regarded by many as the most influential copywriter of the early 1900s, Hopkins did not think highly of humor in ads. According to the 2007 book Humor in Advertising, he said: “People do not buy from clowns.”

The book’s authors, Marc Weinberger and Charles Gulas, distinguish between using humor to sell certain high‐risk product categories, such as sports cars and expensive jewelry (bad idea), and using it to sell the “little treats of life,” such as beer, snacks, and soft drinks (good idea).

Indeed, at the Cannes Lions Festival, the shortlist for the inaugural humor in advertising award featured Pop-Tarts and Uber Eats. But, looking at the rest of the shortlist – CeraVe moisturizing cream, Thailand’s Sabine bras, Dramamine anti-nausea medication and Specsavers opticians – it seems humor has a useful role in selling functional – possibly boring – products.

I never read The Economist

Perhaps Hopkins would have been more impressed with The Economist’s print ads. Mark Boyd, founder of Gravity Road, highlights these for employing wit rather than humor. “I think a lot of print ads can be witty,” he says. “Because print behaves in a different way.”

Mills says this is an important distinction when he works with Nike. There is often discussion of what constitutes ‘Nike wit.’ “I‘m sure there are some funny Nike ads, but generally it‘s more that charm and the humor, and not taking yourself too seriously, which is different,” he says.

Indeed, Weinberger and Gulas argue that when it comes to humor in advertising, medium, context and timing are all key ingredients. TV and radio lend themselves better to funny than print does, while funny ads work often better when placed beside serious content. What was funny on September 10, 2011, might not have been the following day. More credit, then, to The Economist’s timeless wordplays.

So, how to be effective when using comedy in ads? Harvey says any efforts must achieve the elusive art of ‘cut-through.’ They must: “have an impact on a wider scale than just within immediate LinkedIn circles of people supporting it with one another.”

Seits argues that risk works well when it comes to humor. She points to “the kind of work that would have ended up on the cutting floor, that people had to fight for, that actually was a bit risky and took some chances. But also was in service of the brand.”

Commending Peter Kay’s John Smith’s keepy-up ad, Mills says for humor to be effective, it must entertain. Especially now, “as we come out of a period when it seems like the only way you can win an award is by being either really, really clever, or doing something that has virtue-signaling purpose.”

For Boyd, it’s simpler still. To be effective, funny ads should be “brash and witty and make people laugh.”

So, there you have it. Make mine a pint of John Smith’s.