FUNNY ADS — Is humour in TV advertising dying?
Gavin Knight explores funny ads of the past, and why they might not fly today…
A great TV advert should make consumers love a brand so much that they purchase the product again & again. If a film persuades people to take notice, laugh, even discuss it…hey-presto, sales of the brand go up.
What makes a successful ad? For many, just being funny! Let’s take two celebrated beer ads from 1980s. Would either of these TV campaigns get made now?
Carling Black Label — ‘The Dam Busters’
‘The Dam Busters’ uses a famous RAF World War II story for humour — a tricky subject. It’s difficult to image a brand daring to associate itself with bombs & war now.
Carling did a follow up to this ad in 1994 in which a British man beats the Germans to the hotel sunlounges by bouncing his towel across the pool - Dambusters-style. This would be deemed too offensive to our European friends in today’s marketplace!
Heineken — ‘The Water in Majorca’
‘The Water in Majorca’ features an upper-class Sloane learning how to speak with a more ‘common’ accent. Any creative idea to do with class & ‘received pronunciation’ would be binned on paper as too old-fashioned & irrelevant today.
It’s sad that great ideas like these just wouldn’t get made now. Besides the risk of using comedy, two other issues are killing humour in TV campaigns.
The first killer is globalisation. Often a witty campaign only works in one country because it highlights a peculiarity to one culture. Neither of these beer ads would mean much to people in other parts of Europe, let alone America or Asia. When any brand commissions a new campaign the costs are high; they want to maximise its use in as many territories as possible. Hence why so many car commercials look almost the same because they’re planned to be used in all markets & then online without ‘border-crossing’ issues…cue another boring tracking shot of an unseen driver racing down a sign-less open road!
The latest trend for brands at the moment is trying to be worthy & authentic about issues, rather than trying to sell stuff. For some, this works, but for others it can be disastrous.
As Mark Borkowski said in the Sunday Telegraph:
“There is a growing sense among my colleagues that the virtue-signalling that guides advertising decisions is hurting sales. Excessive focus-grouping, the echo-chamber created by the industry’s Hackney-hipster homogeneity and the awards-crazed processes have detached the creative process from the end result: to produce captivating, witty, humorous, makes-you-think-twice ad campaigns that challenge and stimulate the imagination.”
Although a little scathing in his analysis, Borkowski is pointing out how fearful some brands are of being called out for offending anyone or anything, even though it appears consumers don’t care, while other brands are happy to jump on the latest band-wagon with obvious virtue-signalling.
If a brand wants to champion a social issue in its ads, they need to demonstrate they’re actively supporting that issue in other ways or risk consumers ‘outing them’ as disingenuous on social media. Dove is a great example of a brand that ‘walks the walk’ when you look at the work behind the Be Real campaign about body image & anxiety. Others simply talk the talk.
In the 1980s some campaigns were blatantly sexist or misogynist, often promoting the idea of a ‘nuclear’ family, and making anyone ‘other’ the butt of the joke. Yorkie’s ‘Not For Girls’ strapline was still in use as recently as 2011 astonishingly! Quite rightly, very few of these campaigns would fly now.
The bottom line is — it doesn’t matter how woke an agency or brand wants to be, why are their creatives shunning contemporary humour in favour of more boring scripts? Some brands are doing this despite damage to their sales and online mockery — as Pepsi found out with the dreadful Kendall Jenner spot.
So what is fun & acceptable today? Would the famous 1985 Levi’s 501 ad with Nick Kamen get made now? It’s not sexist or racist but it does feature a man undressing & flirting in a public laundrette to wash his clothes with stones. You be the judge:
Levi’s 501 — ‘Laundrette’
This is a great ad that clearly demonstrates the benefits of pre-washed 501s, but I can see so many reasons why it would be rejected in today’s creative meetings. ‘Too Macho’ ‘Gender Stereotypes’ ‘Body Objectification’ - ad execs may scream. It’s funny, it’s sexy & it sold jeans…it set Levi’s 501 as the premium brand for decades — so what’s not to like?
Comedy is hard to do. Hard to come up with ideas & even harder to execute. But if you get it right it’s a goldmine. Young people are savvy & they know when they’re being sold to. Don’t try to mindlessly appease them with politics, issues or your latest ‘brand purpose’, especially if it doesn’t reflect the actual values of the brand. Just make them laugh & they’ll love you for it!
