It’s no secret that people these days respond better to humour than they do to something more “boring” like statistics or straightforward information. People spend so much of their time online focusing on humour that they get easily bored looking at something more serious.
When it comes to making advertisements, you may struggle to get high click-through rates if your ad isn’t very appealing to the people that you want to target. While a great deal of this relies on the visual component of your ad, you may find it useful to switch things up and utilize a more comedic approach to advertising.
There has been a rapid increase over the years in content and advertising becoming more comedic for smaller businesses, which has been met with much better success on social media, as these ads perform better with the algorithm given that more people engage with them.
Larger companies have been making more comedic ads for years, from older Super Bowl ads to silly, memorable TV commercials. There are many different reasons why comedic or meme-centred advertisements work better, and by making the switch, you should see a better return on your investment for advertisements and even general content that’s not paid.
Humor Grabs Attention Better Than Information
One of the biggest problems that any marketer is going to face when making traditional ads is getting around the inevitability of ad blindness. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, ad blindness is a side effect of people seeing so many advertisements that they just mentally tune them out, as if they never even saw them.
This, in effect, makes your ad worthless, and it means you’re not getting your money’s worth out of the ad space you bought. In order to grab the attention of other people scrolling through their social media feeds, you need to make your ad look more like a post and less like any common advertisement.
By starting your ad out with something humorous like a funny image or video, people don’t immediately realize that it’s a sponsored post and are more likely to engage instead of just scrolling straight past it.
The media you use can be related or sometimes unrelated to the actual product you’re promoting. A somewhat related video, for example, would be like the videos being made by a mattress sales outlet who starts the video off with something like a person falling, and then quickly cuts to him falling into the mattress. This is more attention-grabbing and encourages people to pay attention.
One car dealership has made a run of videos, many of which have gone viral and reached large amounts of viewers. They involve a totally unrelated funny video at first of a man being rammed from behind by a bull, which sends him flying forward.
The video meme cuts to someone being catapulted forward (as if the bull hit them), only they slam up against a car and then say just a few words like “Welcome to Carson’s Cars, where we have no bull – just great deals.”
This viral bull meme is used by a wide number of industry brands. The bull sends people flying into restaurants, spas, golf courses, you name it. You can look them up online to see how it’s being done.
Getting through the effect of ad blindness is one of the strongest benefits of advertising with humour. It’s far more likely than any other ad to get through to people who are scrolling through their endless feeds of funny content.
Try to stick to current trends when you’re using meme marketing. You don’t want to pick something that was done two years ago. Instead, use your “For You Page” on TikTok for example or join groups online for recent viral trends and memes and see what recent one you can apply to your business.
Positive Brand Association Is Crucial
Another thing that funny meme content helps avoid is the generation of a negative brand association. Researchers have found that people who are bombarded with ads that they find annoying from the same brands end up developing a negative association with them, whether they like the product or not.
On the other hand, if people like your promotional content a lot, they’ll have a more positive association with your product or brand since it reminds them of something that they like.
If you’re using targeted content or ads, people will most likely see your ad more than once. If they’re repeatedly shown an ad that they dislike, they’ll consistently form a negative association with your brand.
On the other hand, if they keep seeing something that makes them laugh or makes them happy, they’ll always be glad to see it. This can be seen in the consistent sponsorships that many YouTubers incorporate in their videos.
If it’s an annoying or unwelcome sponsorship, many people will start to mock the company rather than download their product. On the other hand, you’ll find each year entire YouTube videos of the most recent Super Bowl ads.
If you can imagine it, people will sit down and watch an entire long video of all of the best of all of the game advertisements. Very few other forms of advertising would get people excited to watch and talk about all of their favourite ads around the water cooler the next day at work.
If you have a positive brand association with your market, people will be far more likely to buy from you, and they may even share the ads with their friends. If it really grabs their attention and interests them, they may even spread your name by word of mouth, which is by far one of the strongest forms of advertising.
The spread by word of mouth goes the other way, as well. People who are fed up enough with obnoxious ads or content may mention them to their friends, who will also avoid that same company just by hearing something negative about them right off the bat.
Consider advertising your first impression with someone. You shouldn’t meet someone and immediately give them an annoying elevator pitch, but rather you’d get to know them somewhat before telling them about what you have that could help them.
Consumers Recall Comedic Commercials More Often
The ability of consumers to recall and remember commercials or ads is vital. Many customers don’t immediately purchase a product or service that they are advertised, even if it does interest them.
Instead, they might wait until their next paycheck comes in or until they have their schedule outlined fully in advance. In this case, unless they’re given the same advertisement again, they need to be able to remember what the ad was so that they can locate your page again.
If it was a fairly generic advertisement, there’s a low chance that they’ll remember it at all outside of knowing it was a product they were interested in. In this case, they’ll probably search it online, which leaves the rest up to SEO.
Think back to the commercials you used to see frequently. Chances are you might still remember a jingle or a phone number to a fun commercial, whether it interested you or not. Many people can recollect these types of advertisements decades later.
If you can make your ad engaging enough by utilizing modern memes and humour, you’ll be able to cement yourself in consumers’ minds, meaning that when the time comes that they want to purchase your product, they’ll remember you well enough to come back to your page.
Another important aspect to remember is that if your ad is genuinely funny enough, you’ll actually see some meme accounts repost it. This not only gives you a form of free advertising, but it also makes more people remember it since they didn’t technically see it as an ad.
This in turn leads to an even greater amount of people who might save the post to come back later who will then shop for your products or services. There have been more than a few small businesses on platforms like TikTok that have gone viral and seen a remarkable increase in sales, whether their business is online or in person.
As long as you can get users to remember your ad and stand out among the endless amounts of uninteresting advertisements, you’ll be remembered by a far greater amount of people and see a higher ROI.
Limitations of Comedic Marketing
For all of its benefits, it’s equally important to understand the limitations that you might encounter when it comes to utilizing comedic-style marketing. If you use it in a scenario that doesn’t fit it, it can have the opposite effect in a number of different ways.
Firstly, it’s highly dependent on the type of business you run. While it can be used in a very wide variety of businesses, you should avoid it when it comes to certain very serious topics.
A funeral home, for example, may not really benefit from utilizing comedic marketing to reach its target audience, as not everyone utilizes humour to deal with grief. While some businesses aren’t inherently comedic, comedy is still welcome for them.
Car sales or restaurants, for example, have seen success with comedic marketing. If it would be inappropriate for your business to utilize comedic marketing, it won’t just dissuade viewers from buying from you, but you may end up being talked about in a negative light.
It’s also important to know that comedic marketing is almost entirely successful in B2C situations. B2C, or business-to-consumer, is a form of business that sells products directly to a consumer, as opposed to B2B, or business-to-business.
Utilizing comedic marketing in a B2B advertisement may work in some instances, but it would be highly dependent on who you’re advertising to. Some people worry excessively about not being funny enough to utilize comedic marketing properly.
If this is a major concern of yours, you may even consider utilizing AI to help you format your ads in an up-to-date comedic format. It is crucial that you utilize appropriate humour for your audience.
It’s likely that you have a good idea of who your market is, especially when it comes to age ranges, and that can have a profound effect on what people consider funny, as it differs so heavily between generations.
What younger audiences find funny, older generations may find confusing and even irritating. If you’re using very up-to-date jokes that younger audiences would find funny, but your product is targeted towards a middle-aged market, they might not understand it at all, or may become annoyed with your ads.
Most B2C businesses will see remarkable success and far more interaction using genuinely funny comedic meme content, both in video and image formats, which will give you a better return on investment.
Ensure you make this concept part of your social media marketing strategy!
