Humour in Cannes: The Best of the Rest
...Last week: the winners. This week: some great TV ads that missed the cut.
Before kicking off:
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Eh?!
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Last week I looked at the prize winners in the Cannes Lions humour stakes. This week: the best (five) of the rest.
This matters. After all, what do Citizen Kane, Pulp Fiction, Raging Bull and Jaws have in common? The never won Best Picture Oscars. So this is other great stuff that might all too easily go ignored.
First up, Lynx discovered that 60% of cat owners would never date someone that disliked cats. So they come up with this little product, and this gem of an ad:
Nice work — indeed, cast your mind back to December 2024 and Lynx’s Robbery won the Funny Ad of the Year accolade among Brands & Humour readers. Lynx know what they’re doing. Right now, among FMCG brands, they’re on it like a car bonnet.
There was some great stuff from the Scandinavian countries. This ad for VIPPS, created in Norway, was shortlisted and is superb little ad, with a lovely reversal:
Also in Norway — and, let’s face it, there are worse places in the world — the Is It Even A City? campaign has lovely nuance. Intelligent, downbeat, it went viral by showing the self-regarding dumbness of so many tourism campaigns (epitomised by the £125,000 slogan for Scotland, unveiled in 2007: Welcome to Scotland).
The other two ads that stood out both involved “the smallest room in the house”, as my grandmother would have said, rather primly. First up, Coffin by Tile.
It’s intriguing because you pretty much know where it’s going to go half way in (and it’s a 45 second ad). But this in itself is intriguing because there is evidence to suggest that we often like funny marketing when we know the punchline in advance.
This might seem dispiriting in terms of humour, but it’s not in terms of commerce. Why? Because it means that audiences rather enjoy watching these ads again and again. And that’s good news for the brands, right?
But there was one ad that I saw on the Monday and couldn’t get out my head the entire week at Cannes. It’s called Dirty Money by an Indian brand called Steadfast. The product itself seems outdated. What is the product? Oh, just watch and you’ll find out.
Top marks for its dirty, sweaty physicality and a wonderful performance from the lead actor whose name, despite my searches, I couldn’t find out. Created by Lowe Lintas in Mumbai, it’s a splendid piece of work.
Is there anything in common in these ads?
Different countries, different products, massively different approaches. But I think one thing we can see is the benefit in digging deep into one-character stories rather than multiple character ones.
Marketing managers love the multi-character approach because it’s very much a way of expanding the audience. The thinking is: by showing more people, you appeal to more people. But when you have breadth, too often you lose depth.
And these stories of a young man trying to seduce his girlfriend, a bookmaker with the runs, or a woman stuck in a church toilet — in all of them, we are involved. And that’s what gives them their emotional impact. As I often say when doing workshops: there’s so much more to humour than quick laughs.
Many thanks for reading,
Paddy