In with the kids but out of touch: brand humour in 2024

Accusing marketers of being out of touch is, sadly, not a new thing…

The long-running embrace of brand purpose is increasingly seen as an example of marketers living on another planet. Buying a packet of Rana pasta, for instance, we are told to Live Life Generously, but nothing at all about, y’know, pasta.

Amid all this overblown self-regard, the fact that marketing is about the identification and communication of value seems to have been forgotten. What’s the best way out of this? Some commentators have noticed an increase in humorous ads over the past few years, suggesting that marketers are getting back in touch with their audiences. What’s more, there’s a strong strategic reason for doing this. Using humour makes customers more likely to buy — a 2022 Oracle survey noted that 72% of people said they’d ‘choose a humorous brand over the competition’, while 91% of people say they ‘more likely to remember a funny ad.’

This increase was given the Cannes seal of approval in late 2023 when the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity introduced a new Use of Humour category. The notion that ads can be entertaining — which, in reality, isn’t that new an idea — seems to have permeated through more than one marketing department. If it means that millions of people see ads with the same love, and enjoyment they have for, say, Schitt’s Creek, it’s got to be a good thing.

So is this happening? Running a humour consultancy, I work with a number of global brands — Harley-Davidson, Epson, AIB — and have the pleasure of watching a lot of funny ads. Obviously, I can’t watch them all — I gotta sleep sometime — but I’d say the report card for now is mixed.

What I’m seeing is that brands who have used humour for years — Volvo, Volkswagen, McDonald’s, IKEA — know what they’re doing, and do it very well. VW come out with gems like this:

Is it out of touch? Not at all. Every parent needs to feed their children. And if their dad’s ruined a large pizza by hitting the accelerator too hard in his Golf, it makes for a lovely ad.

Other brands, however, don’t seem to have fully grasped the fundamentals of using humour in advertising. One of the first rules, for example, is to make the product relevant to the joke being told. This is all-too-often ignored.

This Wrigley’s ad, which came out two years ago, has many enjoyable moments of observational comedy but somehow falls at the final fence. The idea of using chewing-gum as a way of not saying what you want to say seems far-fetched. Why not just smile politely then walk away?

Another ad in the Wrigley’s canon seems to epitomise the dominant wacky-as-funny school of advertising. This is the kind of ad that seems to emphasise wackiness without any sense of surprise — which is central to humour.

There is almost the sense that this was sold into the brand, by the ad agency, as being shareable content so great with Gen Z. But there’s a snag: we aren’t invested in the characters. We don’t know the man in the lift while the idea that he pops a bit of chewing-gum then dances crazily isn’t much of an idea at all.

It might seem unfair to compare car ads to chewing gum ads, so here’s a little case study of an FMCG brand that has used humour effectively: Aldi.

This ad came out over a decade ago. Cheeky, low-key, using a woman in her mid-eighties as the main character, it’s a great example of a brand being in touch with their customer base. For 20 seconds we’re invested in her life: a woman who doesn’t like her husband, but has an eye for the handsome waiter.   

Why do Aldi run such a campaign? Because it’s commercially sound as well as creatively enjoyable. The ad above ran in 2013, and this chart shows Aldi’s edible grocery sales from 2010 to 2020. Of course, not all of this success was due to funny ads, but it certainly has been — and remains — a key dynamic in their success.

Will brands become less out of touch as time goes on? Hopefully. I started this article by looking at Rana and their pompous Live Life Generously slogan. But oddly, they have another slogan that they occasionally use on their boxes:

What a wonderful line! Grudgingly approved by Italian grandmothers. Homely, wise and funny, if they used it on all their packaging they’d sell more pasta — even, indeed, to Italian grannies.

Featured image: Extra – Together Again / YouTube