Humor în Advertising

I. Humor In Advertising

Humor remains one of the most poorly understood (Suther land and Sylvester 2000), and yet at the same time, one of the most prevalent of communications strategies employed in advertising (Alden, Mukherjee, and Hoyer 2000)

Introduction

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines humor as a type of “communication in which the stimulus produces amusement. In all its many-splendoured varieties, humour can be simply defined as a type of stimulation that tends to elicit the laughter reflex ”. Humor is very powerful in advertising because it is a bridge that links the brand and the consumer. It’s been said that laughter is the shortest distance between two people. Humor makes an ad more likely to be repeated by word of mouth and moreover, it makes people feel more comfortable talking about and recommending the brand that uses humour in its ads, because they’ve taken part in some of the brand experience, in a very real way. Humor is also the factor that adds fame and topicality to the brand when people ask each other, “Did you see that ad where…?”. More than any other sales tool, humour invokes a special kind of collective intimacy and it’s a shortcut to being a likeable brand. “Surprisingly, there actually hasn't been much research on the effectiveness of humor in ads. Instead, most research has focused on expectancy: if something in an ad is unexpected, it's more likely to be remembered than something we expect. Even more importantly for advertisers, the unexpected event in the ad must be directly related to their product”.

II. Humor: Evolution and Using

Humor is used in advertising as a way of appealing to consumer’s emotions, and if these are positive ones, they can potentially lead to cognitive processes that stimulate the consumer to purchase the related product. Using it the right way means not only engaging the prospect but getting them to remember the product. Nevertheless, that depends, among others, on social and psychological factors and how a person has been socialized may affect their judgment of humorous advertising.

As Jean Baudrillard said “advertising is probably our era’s most spectacular means of communication” Even since the emergence of the first manifestations of advertising and communication, humour has been a topic of wide interest in the relatively short history of advertising.

Through this project, I want to assess the potential that humour has in the development of the ads and also to show that there are culturally accepted forms of humour in advertising in our country. It should be noted that very few papers address the issue of humour in advertising, and those that do are rarely thorough. Maybe this is due to the advertising trends from the very beginning, when humour was not considered an area of interest for the creators of advertising, such as David Ogilvy. Even he, the creator of one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies did not see humour as an opportunity to develop advertising creations, but further developments in this field have proved just the opposite. ”Horse sense has always affirmed that people buy products they consider nutritious, that save labor and offer value for money - and not because the manufacturer says jokes on television. Claude Hopkins, the father of modern advertising, argued: “The world does not buy from clowns!”. I think this was true in that time and I believe that was true until recently, but the latest wave of factorial analysis shows that humor can now sell. It was a great relief for me to know this; I always hated myself because I rejected funny commercials that were subject of my approval". David Ogilvy also informs us about what appears to be “the golden rule” of using humour in advertising - if the targeted consumers do not see the commercial as being funny, then humour can do more harm than good: "But I must warn you that very, very few can write really funny commercials. If you are not among those few, do not try at all”. An example of this effect comes from a Romanian advertising spot, a very bold one, for the chicken products Transavia. That spot used a type of humor that does not fit our cultural specificity and therefore failed to create positive effects. In other words, the Transavia brand was destroyed from the beginning and today, it is forced to undertake a rebranding, in order to increase consumption of their products. In my opinion, a spot with such a message would fit better in other countries that have “exercise in advertising”.