This might, on first appearance, seem an entirely new newsletter that you haven’t signed up for.
Let me explain.
For the past six years or so I’ve done a regular newsletter, Greatest Hits, about great things I’ve hit upon in marketing and advertising.
It’s been fun to write and — I hope — fun to read. But there was an itch I wanted to scratch.
In short, I loved the funny stuff. I studied humour as part of my Master’s and one of my reasons for getting into advertising, back in February of 1827, was that it was a funny business full of sparky people. In various jobs at various agencies I created funny ads; sometimes, in fact, I got into trouble for making funny ads and had to make long, humbling visits to the HR department.
But those were the ads I liked and admired. Ads such as:
Or these lovely posters:
As social media became more prominent there were feeds I found — and find — amusing, such as Ryanair’s.
So humour became a passion project of mine: the theories, the mechanisms, the effects of it in marketing. As time went on I worked on projects in this area for brands such as Three, Getty Images and Barclays.
This wasn’t so much “writing funny ads”, as getting under the skin of explaining how humour works and how it can, and could, work best for their audiences. It was about profiling customers’ sense of humour exactly, using thinking and methods from psychology. And there’s a core commercial reason for this:
When brands use humour, it makes people more likely to buy from them.
Now I’ve established a consultancy looking specifically at how brands can best use wit. This is my new site: take a look when you have a chance.
Brands & Humour will be a weekly. It’ll be fun to write and, I hope, fun and funny to read. You’ll learn not just about brands and marketing, but about one of the most fascinating, mysterious and unique parts of being a human: having a sense of humour.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for being shipmates on this adventure.
Paddy