Is the golden era of humour in advertising over?

"The last twenty years have seen a steady decline in the use of humour in advertising."

So claims Kantar research, which illustrated this decline with a graph parsing the proportion of ads that were intended to be "funny," "light-hearted" or display "no intended humour" and inviting correlations with the 2008 recession and the Covid pandemic.

According to Kantar, although consumers enjoy humorous adverts, and "humorous ads are more expressive (+27-point increase), more involving (+14) and more distinct (+11)," the fall in funny is due to corporate caution: "What has changed is an increased fear of using humour inappropriately."

This conclusion invites us to open a Pandora's box labelled "cancel culture" and "corporate wokeism." Kantar's generous offer notwithstanding, the graph remains a perfect opportunity to take stock of why advertising is drawn to humour, how it deploys comic tropes and where this wit might be heading.

Here we are now, entertain us

Advertising humour grew from a need to stand out from marketing's madding crowd by spicing information with entertainment. In 1759, Samuel Johnson wrote: "Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it has, therefore, become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick."

And so the eighteenth-century "attention economy" catalysed two new professions eager to prove that wit had an eloquence uniquely sublime: copywriting and art direction.

An early exemplar of copywriting humour, according to the historian Neil McKendrick, was George Packwood who, during the 1790s, advertised his shaving equipment with a relentless flood of "riddles, proverbs, fables, slogans, jokes, jingles, anecdotes, facts, aphorisms, puns, poems, songs, nursery rhymes, parodies, pastiches, stories, dialogues, definitions, conundrums, letters and metaphors."

So pleased was Packwood with his copywriting wit that, in 1796, he collected his adverts into a book called Packwood's Whim.

A century and a half later, "the father of advertising" David Ogilvy set up his own agency and began preaching a marketing gospel that echoed the thinking of Johnson and the tactics of Packwood.

The average consumer now sees 20,000 commercials a year; poor dear. Most of them slide off her memory like water off a duck's back. Give your commercials a flourish of singularity, a burr that will stick in the consumer's mind.

One of commerce's earliest art-directed jokes, according to the historian Frank Presbrey, appeared in 1820, when Warren's Shoe Blacking (which once employed a 12-year-old Charles Dickens) illustrated its product's brilliance with a cat hissing at its reflection in a polished boot.

As Presbrey noted, "this advertising, because it was a novelty, made Warren's Shoe Blacking known throughout the Kingdom and produced a heavy sale." But it also exemplified an "idea-driven" style of art-directed wit that resonates to this day — not only in copycat animal ads for shoe polish …

… and extended shoe-polishing metaphors …

… but in adverts for cleaning products, car wax and taps:

From pioneers like Packwood and Warren evolved three interlocking and self-amplifying groups:

Companies willing to associate their products with humour.

Copywriters and art directors eager to flex their funny bones.

Consumers impatient to be entertained.

Over time, an unspoken tripartite deal was struck: Consumers tolerated companies interrupting their radio shows / TV programs / Instagram scrolls if, once in a while, creatives made them smile.

It doesn't have to be funny funny, but would a glimmer of wit kill you?

Funny funny

Some ads are "funny funny." Indeed the zenith of commercial humour may be a concept funny enough to stand alone that becomes funnier still with a logo.

Such "genuine gag" ads are rare because they require two rare things: agencies witty enough to conceive the joke, and clients brave enough to say yes.

Examples include Alka-Seltzer's "Spicy meatball"; Telenor Group's "Sick"; Doritos's "Ultrasound"; Heineken's "Closet"; John West's "Bear"; Statoil's "Snow"; and this fine comic sketch which works with or without the Berlitz tagline.

Some brands seek genuine gag status by paying for a comic star. This explains why John Cleese has fronted commercials (of varying hilarity) for: the AA, Accurist, ArtistsDirect.com, Best Buy, British Telecom, Cellnet, Compaq, the Czech Olympic team, DirectTV, Giroblauw, Heineken, Intel, Kaupthing, Levis, Magnavox, Nestlé, Planters Pretzels, Schweppes, Sony, Specsavers, Texaco Havoline and TomTom — to say nothing of this bizarre advert for the Israeli chocolate-hazelnut spread Sababa Egozim, which sees him accidentally approving a military air strike against (?) Iran.

But even a Python can miss. In 1998, Cleese fronted Sainsbury's "value to shout about" campaign — which was not only voted the "most irritating advert of the year," it saw the supermarket's shares fall by almost 10% and led Sainsbury's to appoint a new ad agency.

Wishing on a comic star sometimes smacks of corporate caution. For example, although Amazon's 2020 "Before Alexa" ad featured Ellen DeGeneres, the real talent was the agency team at Droga5 London.

Another shortcut to a "genuine gag" ad is to parody the creativity of others. Hence: Hummer × "Great Escape"; Terry's Chocolate Orange × "Raiders of the Lost Ark"; Gillette × James Bond; Nissan × "The Professionals" and "The Sweeney"; FedEx × "Castaway"; and Jeep × "Groundhog Day" — though at least Jeep scored the great Bill Murray.

Knock-Knock

"Knocking copy" describes commercials designed to disparage. Often these adverts talk only of "leading ordinary brands" or "the next best-selling brand" — either out of legal caution or because companies fear amplifying parity with competitors. Hence coy campaigns from names like Dove, Bounty and Fairy.

More confident companies go straight for the jugular: Pepsi versus Coke; Burger King versus McDonald's; and Wilkinson versus Gillette.

Because big brands trading public blows can feel like mom and dad fighting, a more sophisticated strand of knocking copy uses humour to pull its punches. Take Apple's "Get a Mac" campaign which set a dweeby PC against a hipster Mac in some 66 comically caustic (if smug) sketches.

Microsoft's response was unamused and unamusing.

A few brands are confident and clever enough to knock themselves — deploying humorous "two-sided messaging" to mitigate cynicism about advertising, mute their horn-tootling and defuse known knowns about their product's deficits.

Classics of this self-deprecation genre include Avis's 50-year "We try harder" campaign …

… and much-admired campaigns from Buckley's, Marmite, Listerine, Hans Brinker Budget Hotel and Volkswagen. This glorious campaign from Ambipur manages to deprecate not just itself, but the entire perfume industry.

Give 'em the old razzle-dazzle

Humour is a popular tactic of "dazzle brands" eager to distract from products that are charmless or harmful. This explains why avaricious insurance companies not only cling to cute animal mascots but cluster around comedy, as with Nationwide's "Butterfly effect," Farmer's "Firepit," MiWay's "Muriel & Mavis" and Allstate's "Mayhem" campaign.

Humour has similarly been deployed by Kia to green-tinge its cars …

By Yellow Pages to humanise a telephone directory …

By Hamlet to distract from the dangers of tobacco … 

And by a dazzling array of alcohol brands, not least Carlsberg …

It's unclear whether the riptide of recreational drugs will ever be allowed to advertise as widely as alcohol is (and tobacco was). The American brand Select Cannabis, for example, posted an image to Instagram, with the caption, "billboards we would make if laws weren't a thing."

But a strand of cannabis brands is already flexing its funny bone on the socials. And with names like Seth Rogan, Sarah Silverman, Roseanne Barr and Chelsea Handler jumping on the weed wagon, stoner comedians will inevitably use comedy dazzle to monetise stoner highs.

"A Smile in The Mind"

The most popular, lasting and successful strand of advertising humour is that which provokes what Beryl McAlhone and David Stuart called "a smile in the mind" — where brands lead us to the brink of enlightenment, but we complete the circuit.

Although this technique works across television and radio, the mind's smile is at its widest within the tight parameters of print, where it tests the gag reflex of copywriters …

… and art directors:

Smile in the mind ads appeals to consumers because they are gratifying, flattering and fun. According to the neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, "whenever we successfully solve a puzzle, we get rewarded with a zap of pleasure." But we also experience a flush of pride — for such ads are the intellectual equivalent of Betty Crocker cake mix, where consumers transform processed food into "homemade goodness" by adding the eggs themselves.

The corporate appeal of mind-smile commercials is that they are engaging, memorable, sharable and often relatively cheap. Moreover, like cake-mix flavours, ad concepts can be usually spun out in a range of iterations, as Colgate did in this teeth-whitening campaign.

High brow

While luxury brands routinely depict lifestyles beyond the financial grasp of mere mortals, few companies ever really challenge their consumer's intellectual abilities. When they do, it's usually via the flattery of Apple's "think different" campaign.

Or through the didactic lens of The Guardian's 1986 "points of view" commercial … 

High-brow humour adverts are rarer still because narrowcasting jokes to the elite is tricky to execute and potentially alienating. The most celebrated high-brow humour campaign was run for decades by The Economist. While reliably confident and clever, many of these ads are funnier than they are tricky …

… but a few demand a moment or three of thought.

Yet even these ads are more complex than they first appear. Sure, they flatter and amuse consumers who can crack the code, but they also imply that even those in on the joke require The Economist to succeed. Like the Financial Times's 25-year "No FT, No Comment" campaign, The Economist ads are actually targeting impostor syndrome. But whereas the FT used fear … 

… The Economist deploys wit:

Funny peculiar

Surrealism is a high-wire act for advertising, for if the line between high concept and low farce is hard for auteurs to tread, it's harder still for C-suites.

That said, notable high-brow surrealist successes include such (semi-)serious offerings as: Dunlop's "Test for the Unexpected"; Benson & Hedges' "Iguana"; PlayStation's "The Third Place" by David Lynch; and decades of Guinness ads, such as "Dreamer".

At the unabashedly comedic end of the market, surrealism merges with inanity to inspire madcap campaigns like: Old Spice's "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like"; Peperami's "Animal"; Budweiser's "Frogs"; Pot Noodle's "Welsh miners," "Slag," and "Horn"; Cadbury's "Gorilla"; Stella Artois' "Le Sacrifice" and this hugely popular campaign for Tango.

To the consumer, surrealist ads are flattering when serious and entertaining when silly. For companies, surrealism can intrigue (Guinness), dazzle (Benson & Hedges), amuse (Cadbury's) or cause a comic stir (Pot Noodle).

The last laugh?

Notwithstanding Kantar's ominous graph, advertising ain't done with humour.

Just as irony did not, in fact, "end" with 9/11, so advertising will not dump the funny in the face of cancel culture. Naturally, marketing will adapt: mule brands will continue to kick out for effect and mice brands will burrow even deeper. But even when punchlines provoke Oscar-winning slaps, comedy is too successfully ingrained into the culture of commerce, the creativity that sells it and the consumers who lap it up to be discarded.

We may disagree on what counts as funny, but we're united in disdaining the dull.

That said, commercial humour has recently undergone a sea change. The adverts cited above, by and large, represent a traditional send-and-receive model of comedy, where the brand is the "stand-up" — alone in the spotlight, controlling the audience, holding the mic.

But in our fragmentary world of social and sharing, such one-way transmission is no longer the only model, not necessarily the most effective — especially when the holy grail of all campaigns is genuine grass-root virality.

As jokes become memes, ideas become vibes, and "smiles in the mind" give way to "smirks in the voice," brands are morphing from stand-up to class clowns.

And so the real question may not be, "Is the joke over for advertising?" but, "Are we abandoning the golden age of wit for a bronze age of Brandter?"

Join us after the (festive) break for part two … and don't touch that dial.

Ben Schott. Illustration: TBS

Ben Schott is a Bloomberg Opinion visual columnist. He created the Schott's Original Miscellany and Schott's Almanac series, and writes for newspapers and magazines around the world.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.