Some news: ‘Brands & Humour’ has been a weekly newsletter over the past two years. From this issue on, it’s going fortnightly.
Why? It’s certainly not because I’m running out of ideas1. However, client commitments play a part. What’s more, you deserve quality and that takes time. I’d far prefer to spend a lot of time writing a really good newsletter than dashing off something forgettable — there’s far too much of that on the internet, as you might well have noticed.
I ended the first issue with the words ‘Thank you for being shipmates on this adventure’. Almost two years on the readership has soared from the hundreds to well into the thousands, and I can only repeat these words now:
Thank you.
***
Today, I thought I’d start something new. For a while I’ve been thinking of looking at the various techniques in humorous advertising. So we’ll do this over the summer, kicking off today with one of the beauties:
The Visual Pun
To begin at the beginning, we all know what a pun is:
‘I wondered why the Frisbee was getting bigger. Then it hit me.’
You have a double meaning: the Frisbee hits the teller both physically and mentally.
Linguistically, puns can feel contrived. But in ads, they can be things of beauty:
Now, I love ads like this. In a world saturated with clutter and noise, they have a kind of Zen minimalism to them. The humour they provide is low-key; there is no butt of the joke (apart from Van Gogh, but he’s been dead 134 years, and seems unlikely to sue). The mechanism they use is called incongruity-resolution: we see an incongruity and resolve it — we solve a puzzle, in other words (more on this here).
But sometimes visual puns can seem too clean — almost, well, clinical. That’s why good advertising integrates visual puns into recognisable situations. With the three print ads above, they’re all verging on the abstract. But in this ad (below), this situation could happen (the headline reads: So? Isn’t it time you saw an optician?):
One thing — a jacket tail — is mistaken for being another. The social dimension makes it funnier.
Likewise, this could happen:
“Ah,” you might say, “but these are both for opticians”. Is there any other category that does this?
Indeed, there are many: the French ad below is for a chocolate bar. This ad isn’t flawless by any means — the black van driver is clearly a racial stereotype — but the central image of the middle-aged man stretching his legs/pushing his Porsche is just wonderful:
So, there we have it. The visual pun: a simple, and essential, part of humorous advertising.
So do all humorous ads need visual puns? Well, no: there are plenty of ways of skinning a rabbit, as the old phrase goes. Much depends on the brand, the product, the audience and the proposition: indeed, exploring these factors is what I do for a living.
Let’s catch up in a fortnight. In the meantime, if you’re missing your weekly B&H fix, don’t fret: here are the three most-read issues over the past two years:
Six Ads, Six Lessons (June 2023)
In Praise of James Blunt (April 2024)
Many thanks for reading,
Paddy
pg@studiogilmore.com
+44 7866 538 233
LinkedIn: here
I’ve got a Googledoc with newsletter ideas: it has 42 pages and seems to expand, like the universe, daily.