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No place for jokes in serious times? Here’s how advertising can get humour right
As advertisers navigate across complex social terrains, fewer wish to engage with jokes in recent years in fear of being cancelled over unsuccessful deliveries. Will the industry eventually grow out of the humorous approach? Darcy Song speaks with Showpony's Rory Kennett-Lister and Archibald Williams' Kiranpreet Kaur on how to get it right in serious times.
After a few turbulent years, consumers globally are now looking for happiness in all likely places. While advertising remains a good venue to entertain, research has found the presence of humour in marketing has been on a steady decline.
According to Oracle’s Happiness report – a global study about post-pandemic consumer values – the discrepancy between consumer expectations and finished advertising products is only getting more significant. Although 63% of Australians believe brands can do more to deliver happiness to their customers, business leaders said only 23% of their general ads (TV, billboards) and 20% of their online ads actively use humour.
However, the real problem lies not within businesses’ disfavour of humour, but in their fear of being cancelled over an unsuccessful delivery, the research reported.
Rory Kennett-Lister
This decline can be especially disheartening to see in Australia – a market where advertisements of all trades love to show the funny side of life (including political party campaigns whose humour can get quite snarky). But many creatives in the market, including Rory Kennett-Lister, creative director of Showpony, believe humour will not disappear completely in advertising because “the darker things get, the more light you need”.
The creative agency took a humorous approach in its ‘See Me for Me’ campaign for the South Australia Government’s Department of Human Service earlier this year. Addressing the typically sombre topic of living with disability, the work was fused with light-hearted plot twists that confront people with their own preconceptions.
While the campaign is still collecting measured results, Kennett-Lister said that having received positive feedback from the community and a response from Nickelback, who had an honourable mention in the campaign, “was proof that we were doing something right”.
Glad you’re not embarrassed anymore! Next time we’re down under we’ll make sure to get you to a show https://t.co/ZCZNmCKdHE
— Nickelback (@Nickelback) July 7, 2022
Speaking about what makes humour in a campaign effective, especially for sensitive topics such as disability, Kennett-Lister said it’s all about not letting the joke overshadow the goal.
“I think the humour worked in this particular case [See Me for Me] because it was a misdirect. It set up an expectation and then flipped it, which was unexpected … I don’t think slapstick humour would have worked in this context, for example.
“It’s less about whether you should be doing humorous advertising or not, it’s whether you’re making a concept that resonates or not. And humour is one of the ways you can do that.”
Although he empathises with businesses’ sentiment of wanting to adopt safer marketing approaches, Kennett-Lister said humorous advertising is a good way to cope with dark situations.
“Humour is always an expression of culture, and I think historically we’ve always told ourselves in Australia that there’s this kind of Larrikin ideal. I don’t know how true that is as a broad subject, but it’s definitely something that we tell ourselves.
“I feel like advertising for a while has gone – I mean this is reflective of society more broadly – to a very principled advertising: this is what we stand for, this is who we are, this is how we make a difference in the world.
“And that’s great if it’s done genuinely and with an impetus to change something behind it, but I also think there’s a real place in advertising to entertain and to do something that gives people a little laugh and engages them that way.”
Kiranpreet Kaur
Kiranpreet Kaur, managing director of Archibald Williams, added while clients are rightfully apprehensive about humour in the current advertising landscape, it remains an effective way to stand out in a category.
“There’s an audience out there who genuinely just wants to have a good time and may not respond to what something very serious. They might even turn their head away from something serious because they want to hide from it.
“Australians use comedy to deal with everything good and bad, you can be at a funeral and Australians will crack jokes … So I think it’s funny that we shy away from it in this market – we shouldn’t.”
So how can businesses and marketers get humour right? Kaur said it comes down to a basic yet important rule – researching and testing with target audiences. Born in Canada and having spent a significant proportion of her career in Australian independent agencies, she says when companies are speaking to a market like Australia that’s multilingual – especially using an approach as nuanced as humour – it’s essential to define who’s on the receiving end.
“Strategically, getting the human insight right on what type of emotion they [consumers] feel towards a product or the experience that you’re trying to sell, and just generally how they feel for that particular target audience is the core.
“And how you get that insight is up to you, people have different ways of approaching that. There’s research, competitive analysis, along with creative testing, all of those can help.”
“If you’re trying to build an emotional journey and take an emotional tactic like humour that can’t immediately get people to become a loyal buyer the same day, it has to be a long-term plan. You’re going with a greater, deeper outcome.”
Darcy Song was a reporter at Mumbrella, covering media owners, adtech and social platforms. She left in October 2023.
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