Laugh First, Think Later
How humour has helped shape some of the most persuasive advertisements
Advertisements.
Sometimes considered one of the biggest banes of streaming platforms, they are notorious for disturbing content repeatedly, yet are also invaluable tools in marketing a company’s product - these products include tangible things like cutlery and furniture and intangible things such as movies and songs.
Their notoriety has led to a lot of criticism for them, which led to some companies covering up for it using humour. Resisting an advertisement would feel normal. Resisting an advertisement disguised as humour would not. When persuasion ('Buy our latest pressure cooker, now with an extra-colourful outer shell and a louder than ever whistle!') is replaced with amusement ('Under stress from family? Make food, go to work, fix the car! Why take pressure, when our brand-new Pressure Cooker 3,000™ does it perfectly for you?’), people lower scepticism, and engage more with the content.
The concept of peripheral route persuasion plays a central concept here - people are less likely to be critically analytical of something if they are emotionally entertained. When a normal ad plays with a person in a lab coat seriously speaking about the benefits of a product, it feels old. Used. Mentally unstimulating. When an ad starts with a joke, an unexpected occurrence, or something of the sort, even if one is intellectually ‘tired’, the ad still grabs their attention - it’s difficult for it not to.
The humour makes the advertisement appear non-threatening; it may be easy to consider the person in a lab coat as simply a paid actor but considering the random confused humans cracking up the audience as a paid actor is something the audience does not want to do - they are sentimentally attached to this character. This attachment may feel superficial as it formed within a few seconds of watching an advertisement, but is in reality an attachment that is formed because the advertisement is not like other prosaic advertisements.
A perfect example is Thai advertisements. They are famous for being ridiculously unhinged, combining melodrama with humour. To understand the meaning of the word ‘unhinged’, think of it like this: would you prefer an advertisement that a company’s wall plaster is reinforced with extra gypsum and anti-dust technology to make your house clean?
Or would you prefer an advertisement like this: two lizards run towards each other and are about to hug when the floor beneath them cracks and one lizard dramatically falls through. This floor was the ceiling for a family’s home, and they witness the two lizards being separated. All of them gang up and holler at the father for not using proper wall plaster, because that plaster would have held strong and the one lizard hadn’t died. The father expresses remorse and snaps his fingers to suddenly coat the walls in that plaster.
The second advertisement may sound cringe. But in the middle of watching videos and feeling tired of ads, an advertisement showing the dramatic separation of lizards due to bad wall plaster sticks - tonal disproportion, treating a tragedy with excessive seriousness makes it entertaining. A user laughs and shares it along, simply to entertain others. Unknowingly, the user becomes a distributor of the content. Sometimes, humour does not support the product’s value. Sometimes it becomes the product’s value.
Humour in advertising is powerful because laughter interrupts critical distance. At the precise moment consumers should analyse persuasion carefully, humour encourages them to relax instead.
The most effective advertisement is not the one that convinces people. It is the one that prevents them from realising they are being convinced.