Let’s kick off with a little dilemma:
You’re the Head of Marketing for a major brand. You have a phenomenal amount of money in your budget. You want to go big with a TV commercial. All the indicators suggest you can, and should, use humour in your forthcoming ad campaign — you’ve done your homework and everything seems set.
But something’s keeping you up at night.
TV ads don’t come cheap: they’re very pricey to make and very pricey to broadcast.
So here’s your headache:
How do you create an ad that people will want to see again and again and again?
***
One of the curiosities about humour is repetition. Some types of humour elicit a groan; other manifestations of humour we like to go back to repeatedly. For example, speaking personally, this type of joke:
What cheese is vain?
Halloumi.1
…I’d be happy to hear no more than once.
And yet! This classic scene from Seinfeld I’ve watched countless times and I’ll doubtless watch many, many more. I know it almost line for line: it still makes me laugh.
Likewise with ads. This FedEx ad, from 1981, is a gem. Call me geeky, but this is something I don’t just watch as an ad: I go back to it again and again as entertainment.
So! If you have a funny ad that people like and want to watch repeatedly, you’ve found the Holy Grail of TV advertising.
Can we find this?
One answer is provided by an intriguing theory with, it must be said, rather a dull name. It’s called Comprehension-Elaboration Theory and was developed by two psychologists, R. S. Wyer and J. E. Collins, in the early 1990s2.
It has its roots in Gestalt theory: the notion that “humans tend to perceive objects as complete rather than focusing on the gaps that the object might contain.”3 For example: let’s suppose I say bird. You might well think of feathers, a beak, or flight. You might not typically think of an ostrich, or a chicken, or a penguin — they’re still birds, sure, but these are elaborations on your basic comprehension.
If we apply this to the Seinfeld scene above, the scene opens and we immediately think diner. Now, when we think diner, we don’t immediately think it’s an appropriate place to:
come on to a woman you don’t know
talk to this woman about being unemployed
talk to this woman about living with your parents, when you’re well into your 40s
expect that woman to then introduce herself in a flirty, sultry voice
…Hence the number of elaborations in your mind multiplies. Hence you want to see it again. And again. And again.
In other words:
Humour with high elaboration potential is more likely to be funny after many repetitions; in terms of ads, these ads will ‘wear well’.
Humour with low elaboration potential is met with less amusement with repetition, and probably not much amusement when encountered for the first time; these ads will ‘wear out’.
What’s an ad with low elaboration potential? I’d say this is a contender:
Our comprehension? A bespectacled teenager in a school hall. He swallows a Maoam sweet and starts dancing crazily. And, er, basically that’s yer lot folks. We can’t elaborate much on this at all. It’s wacky, and that’s that4.
What does all this mean for brands? It suggests that more complexity in humorous ads stimulates more elaboration and so we are more inclined to watch them again and again. Now, the word complexity in that previous sentence might seem alarming — it’s a common credo in modern marketing that simplicity is king. To be clear: I don’t mean complexity in the sense of quantum physics; rather, just a little more depth and forethought, and a greater knowledge of how humour functions. That’s all.
This theory hasn’t yet been solidly proved. But there is ample evidence to suggest the academics might be onto something. If so, it would explain why I watch a scene from Seinfeld too many times that I care to mention — and why audiences will watch certain funny ads again and again which, for any brand manager, is music to their ears.
Many thanks for reading,
Paddy
Book a meeting with me here / www.studiogilmore.com / pg@studiogilmore.com / +44 7866 538 233 / Twitter: @mrpaddygilmore
Halloumi = “Hello me”. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my wife for telling me this joke, many years ago. Despite this, we are happily married with two children.
Wyer, R. S. & Collins, J. E.: ‘A theory of humour elicitation’, Psychological Review, 99 (4), 1992.
Wikipedia, I thank you.
You may object: “But! That video has got 2.7m views on YouTube!” Fair point. But I’d be interested to know how many of these are repeated viewings. Also, in our age of fake clicks and tallies, I’d be interested to know how many of the clicks are people and how many are robots — who, let’s face it, seem unlikely to eat sweets of any kind.