Welcome to part two of my little overview of techniques in humour. This week: exaggeration.
Exaggeration can be found in many types of humour. Take this joke:
Did you hear about the cargo ship carrying yoyos?
It sank 44 times.
It’s much better than:
Did you hear about the cargo ship carrying yoyos?
It sank 3 times.
…You take my point.
On Planet Advertising, there are four ways in which exaggeration works. You could exaggerate…
the product
the danger of not buying it
the benefit of having it
the customer devotion to it
So! Plenty to get our teeth into. Let’s get stuck in.
Exaggerating the Product
Imagine this: you’ve jumped into a time machine and headed back to 1986. You’re a senior marketing leader at Guinness. You’ve created a very low-alcohol lager — a rare thing in those days. How do you market it? You just get a former alcoholic to create a great, and super-simple, ad for it:
…How does it work in print? This is a gem of an ad from McDonald’s Sweden:
Again, nice work.
Scale is inherently funny — except, of course, when it’s a massive statue of a Communist dictator. Sometimes we ‘make the connection’ when we link (as above) the size of the coffee stains and the huge volume of a large McDonald’s coffee. At other times, we just take delight in the sheer oddity of it. It sticks in our mind, the way a good ad should.
Exaggerating the danger of not buying the product
Imagine you’re advertising running shoes. Why do people run? Well, they don’t want to get fat, for one thing. So this is what Reebok did back in 2000:
Now! If you’re smart — and all readers of B&H are — you could work this the other way by exaggerating the competitors’ products as too small. This is what Wendy’s did, back in 1984, in a hugely effective campaign:
…Clever thinking that, and it got them all-important market share from McDonald’s (them again) and Burger King.
Exaggerating the product benefit
All products have benefits — if they don’t, they won’t sell. So when the benefit is exaggerated, it’s seen as an even better product. Lynx have been using this technique for years. This ad just came out a month ago, but is a great example:
Meanwhile, I’ve always loved this German ad for double-glazing: that’s how good their soundproof windows are.
Exaggerating the customer devotion to the product
Picture this: you’ve just paid hundreds of pounds for an Eames chair. But you’d ruin it just to open your bottle of Stella Artois. Why? Because that’s how much you love the lager.
But perhaps my current favourite ad of this type is this one, for Dunkin’ Donuts. Just marvellous:
***
There’s an old advertising saying: Push it. The copywriter Dan Nelken, in a very good book1, rephrases this as “What’s the benefit of the benefit?” Inevitably, this can lead to exaggeration.
So if you use exaggeration per se, will the final ad be funny? Frankly, no. There are many more factors that come into play. Plus there are countless humorous ads that don’t use this technique. This Škoda ad from the early 1990s is funny, but doesn’t use exaggeration at all.
Likewise, this cute Danone ad from Brazil:
As I mentioned in the last issue of B&H, here, there are plenty of tools to create funny advertising. You wouldn’t use a chisel to hammer a nail into a wall. Well I would, but I’m rubbish at DIY.
Many thanks for reading,
Paddy
pg@studiogilmore.com
+44 7866 538 233
LinkedIn: here
Nelken, Dan: A Self-Help Book for Copywriters, www.nelkencreative.com, 2021