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.

“A lot of people on your podcast became creatives by accident.”
Someone messaged me this last week (after listening to four of them back-to-back).
I got me thinking; why do creatives become creatives?
I’d divide them into two groups.
The Lifestyle Brigade™ - attracted by the trappings. (Nothing wrong with that - it’s why most people go to work.)
And the Expressionists™ - attracted by putting a bit of themselves out into the world.
A point of view, an observation, a joke, whatever.
Like 90% of creatives, they're likely to be introverts.
Advertising, for them, is the conduit to a wider audience.
It's not like creating a widget in an ad factory, it’s much more personal.
Their work reflects the values they live by.
They don't find it helpful to patronise, bullshit or lie when talking to people day to day, so they don't do it talking to people via pixels or ink.
Dealing with humans on a regular basis, they've found logic, facts, humour and honesty persuade harder.
So these are the tools the reach for most often.
Nick Cohen is one of the best examples of the Expressionists™.
It's hard to think of anyone who’s leaned harder into the ‘honest’ tool.
Nick has just written an excellent book about his fabulous experiment - Mad Dogs and Englishmen.
It's a joy.
It made me want to get into advertising all over again.
We had a great chat about the book, the agency and honesty in advertising.
Hope you enjoy it.

So far, I’m about eighty podcasts in.
If someone tells me they listen, they usually follow up with ‘that Frank Lowe one’s great’ (or ‘sick’, depending on their age).
I always ask why, but never get a clear answer.
They just like it.
It was enjoyable to record too, but I left wondering why
he’d barely mentioned Lowe Howard-Spink.
As if he’d only ever worked at CDP.
Which was a shame, CDP had been amazing, but they weren’t my era.
Lowe’s was.
By the time I’d snuck into advertising the cool agencies were the new ones – GGT, BBH, AMV and the agency that carried Frank’s name.
Year after year, they won big awards for big clients.
Stella Artois, Vauxhall, Tesco, Heineken, I could go on.
So I will – Lloyds Bank, Reebok, Weetabix, Gordons Gin, Parker Pens, The Mail On Sunday, Condor, Castella, Tizer, Ovaltine, KP, The Hanson Trust, Birds Eye, Smirnoff, Coca-Cola – they were huge.
And all of those clients won awards.
And, unlike CDP, they started opening or acquiring offices across the globe.
But it wasn’t always this way.
In 1981, only months after opening their doors, they were in turmoil.
Totally dysfunctional.
Having swiped a big chunk of CDP’s senior talent, they didn’t have a plan or structure of how to use them.
Who over-saw who?
Did anybody over-see anybody?
Who was Creative Director?
Dave Horry? Alan Waldie? John O’Driscoll? John Kelley? Alfredo Marcantonio? Or the recently added former CDP superstar Geoff Seymour?
They found that too many creative leaders meant they had no creative leader.
Six months in, Horry, O’Driscoll and Kelley walk.
On the way out the door, they advise Frank that he needed a Creative Director and it should be the least-known and youngest of the breakaways – Alfredo Marcantonio.
Suddenly, things started to work.

We talk about why and the rest of Marc’s career, hope you enjoy it.

I​ u​sed to like Tesla​s, I nearly bought one.
​N​ot any more.
Obviously it’s ​still a great product​, but it’s an Elon Musk company.
And his purchase of Twitter, ​and subsequent flooding of my feed with his ​thoughts has put me off him.
​​I choose not to give my money to a multi billionaire who whines everyday about how unfair the world is.
I want best product for the least amount of money, but who I buy it from counts too.
If I like the company I​’ll give the benefit of the doubt, if I don’t, I’ll swerve them.
I suspect I’m not alone.
But most creative work is judged as if it’s being consumed by a cyborg, only logic and facts, as if 1% more of this or 3% less of that will win the day.
Rarely factoring in what people may think of the company.
I guess it gets you talking about brand advertising and that’s indulgent and squishy isn’t it?
Not like hard sell – that makes the money, doesn’t it?
Paul Feldwick gives a different view in his excellent book ‘Why Does The Peddlar Sing?’.
And unlike most books written by people about themselves……it’s unvarnished.
It focuses on the famous Barclaycard campaign; from the first pitch to the last ad.
If you’d have asked him why the campaign was successful back then, he’d have pointed to the key messages, like the free travel insurance.
Now, he he has a different view ‘Rowan Atkinson​. People liked him and that rubbed off on Barclaycard.’
And the messaging underpinning the ads? ‘Well, an ad has to have a message, otherwise it just feels a bit weird?’
I​ really enjoyed chatting with Paul, hope you enjoy it too.

P.s. The peddlar sings to attract and enchant people, it increases sales.

A muffin company wants to make more money.
It's hard to increase their current customers weekly muffin intake - so they need add some new ones.
To flip muffin fans who aren't choosing theirs, they need to tell them about their company or muffins that will get them to try one.
And tell them in a way that gets their attention.
But the first thing they need to do is choose who to speak to.
An ad agency?
A design company?
Branding agency?
Packing firm?
Social media experts?
Behavioural scientists?
Media agency?
I could go on.
And on.
Is it helpful to muffin companies out there to slice ‘communication’ into so many tiny specialisms?
Some ad agencies dabble in design, some designer companies do the odd ad.
But why is it so segmented?
Essentially, we're all working with words and pictures to create personalities.
Michael Johnson has always straddled that line, the last 30 years running Johnson Banks.
And straddled it well, picking up every creative award going, for design and advertising.
We had a great chat, hope you enjoy it.
Dx