BONUS ISSUE: Humour & Cannes
...Cannes introduced a Humour Category. Who won? Were they any good?
This past June was something of a landmark in humour and advertising, so much so I feel you deserved a special bonus edition of Brands & Humour.
Why so special? Well, the world’s biggest advertising festival is widely agreed to be the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Adland people all around the world head to the south of France to sink Champagne, celebrate great ads and toast their, er, back-breaking labour in the creation of them.
Does it help that Cannes is a classy Mediterranean port, filled with super-wealthy people, stunning superyachts and sun-bleached bars and cafés?
Let’s just say: it doesn’t hurt.
But I digress.
This year, for the first time ever, they had a Use of Humour category. They picked the winner and a runner-up. So I thought this week I’d go through them, fresh off the press, just to give you my first reactions.
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Specsavers’ The Misheard Version won a Silver Lion — as far as I can tell, no Gold Lion was awarded in this category1. In other words: this got first prize.
The idea: take an iconic eighties song, Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, and commission Astley to re-record it in a misheard fashion. This would, they claimed, make people aware of the need to have hearing tests. As the video modestly notes, this was “the world’s first mass hearing test, causing chaos across socials.” (One rule of advertising: never let the truth get in the way of a massive over-statement).
The result? Specsavers’ hearing test bookings went up 1,200% above target. Good news for them.
It’s a nice campaign and a wonderful bit of PR. My one reservation is that Maxell did a similar campaign back in 1989, taking a well-known song and recording the misheard lyrics. This ad has charm and is beautifully acted — especially the actor’s sheepish grin towards the end. So I see the Specsavers campaign as a riff on this.
More broadly, Specsavers are known and rightly admired for their use of humour: I’ve discussed them in B&H here and here. So I would see this as a long-service medal for some great work over the years. Check out this beautiful collection of shorts for FilmFour sponsorship:
The Bronze Lion went to a campaign called Sweethearts Situationships — basically taking a well-known American sweet (below)…
…And “collecting and selling” (yeah, right) the blurry rejects…
Why do this? You mean, you don’t know?! It’s a homage to the fact that Generation Zs today aren’t in relationships but situationships (“a romantic or intimate relationship that lacks clear definitions or commitments typically associated with traditional romantic relationships”2).
Hmmm.
A nice idea, certainly, but it’s not necessarily a nice funny idea. Also, awards jury members love Gen Z as they seem hip and cool and young and groovy and everything they — and I, for that matter — were 30 years ago.
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Let’s move on.
One entry got on the shortlist but didn’t get a Lion of any sort — a shame, because I rather like it.
Here’s it in a nutshell: there’s a New Zealand pizza company called Hell who did a promotion last year called Afterlife Pay, whereby you contractually agree to pay for your pizza after you die.
The Hell campaign delivered pizzas to 666 people (geddit?) in New Zealand, then 666 people in Australia. Hell said the campaign was a critique of the ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ culture in New Zealand which I find a bit tenuous. Call me simple-minded, but I’d say the campaign was an attempt to sell more pizzas, right?
Still, I like the macabre humour in it. More importantly, this uses a very different humour mechanism to the campaigns above. It uses a mechanism called arousal-safety which deals with subjects that many people consider taboo — in this case, death. This ad (below) is a nice example of it — dealing with bears doing, y’know, in the woods:
In short, if this had won a gong, it would have shown that the Cannes jury are more aware of other ways of creating funny ads.
Alas, the ad agency behind Afterlife Pay — Yarn — left France empty-handed for the long, long flight back to Auckland.
I suspect the Cannes awards jury will pay dear in the afterlife.
Many thanks for reading,
Paddy
pg@studiogilmore.com
+44 7866 538 233
LinkedIn: here
To explain: there are three Lions on offer: a gold, silver and bronze. The gold is the most prestigious, and the silver and bronze… well, you can work that out.
More broadly, you might well ask: does all of this matter? Very good question. The existence and supposed importance of Cannes divides the advertising industry hugely. However, so as to avoid a 500,000-word newsletter, I’ve sidestepped the various debates around it here.