Whatever happened to funny ads?
Have clients stopped buying them?
Or have agencies stopped writing them?
They used to dominate the ad breaks.
Humour was the first tool you reached for after being handed a brief.
Why? Well, as that Poppins women says ‘A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down’.
Actually…did they dominate ad breaks?
Maybe I’ve slipped on my rose-tinted specs again?
I reach for an old D&AD Annual.
Randomly, I pick up 1991’s.
34 tv and cinema ads featured; 28 were funny.
Of the 28, the most awarded were for Barclaycard and Red Rock Cider.
They feel slightly odd today.
They aren’t ‘advertising funny’, they’re actually funny.
In a way that I can’t imagine them popping up between Bake Off?
I don’t know whether it’s because they don’t take the product very seriously? Some even make fun of it. (Imagine; making fun of the very people who pay the bills?)
Or maybe getting bigger laughs than the programmes that surround you feels like bad form?
Like you have aspirations above your station.
I decided to do a bit of rudimentary desk research, discovering that humour is still surprisingly popular.
The public love it, apparently.
Much preferring it to being lectured to or bullshitted.
So why the lack of funny ads?
Even ad testing companies are urging us to produce more.
(Yes System 1, I’m talking about you.)
In an effort to better understand this humour thing, I went straight to the Chairman of the Board, the Grand Fromage, the Capo di Tutti Frutti – John Lloyd.
Not only did he shoot both the campaigns above, he’d spent two decades beforehand producing the funniest stuff on tv, including Not The Nine O’clock News, Blackadder and Spitting Image.
We had a lovely chat, hope you enjoy it.