I was driving with my friend Marty the other day and he said, “I see so much really bad advertising on TV, how do things so bad get approved?”
We’ve all asked ourselves that at one time or another because there is so much talent out there and so many great agencies and yet, still, so much bad. And from 2002 to 2023, humor in advertising was on a steady decline.
Of course, a lot of things contribute to the caca that pervades. But there is one belief about the purchase process that is fundamentally false. And it is the one belief that causes so many of the problems.
Companies believe, too often, that people make rational decisions. But they don’t. People don’t buy things for rational reasons. People make emotional decisions and then rationalize them.
That’s true for everything we buy from cars, to clothes, to facial cleansers. We buy for emotional reasons and then we justify the purchase by citing product benefits. NOT the other way around. As proof, you can simply look to the three largest purchases of your life: your home, your car and your spouse.
Home purchasers typically look at the home they buy an average of 1.5 times. That’s it. They don’t even return a second time or run the shower or climb onto the roof.
The average price for a new vehicle in 2023 was over $47,000. Many people purchase luxury cars for upwards of $60,000 - $80,000. But you can get an AWD Kia for around $26,000 or a Honda Civic for $25,000 and it will get you, rationally, from point A to point B the same as the $80,000 BMW. Heck, buy three Civics and match them to your wardrobe.
And your spouse? Nothing rational about that acquisition. It’s all emotion. So we don’t make rational purchase decisions when we’re buying Juice, clothes or power tools either.
A study undertaken by the Wharton School of Business and the Advertising Research Foundation agrees. (And they’re smart, rational people.) They analyzed 880 entries to the UK’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising Effectiveness Awards, which are based solely on business results of campaigns. And they cited two things that a campaign should do to be successful:
- Influence consumers emotionally rather than rationally
- Create ads with "talk value"
Now that said, there is, and always will be, a need for rational benefits in the purchase funnel. Because once people are emotionally taken by a brand, they need rational reasons to justify the purchase. But they need to react emotionally first.
Humor, of course, has proven to be the most effective emotional trigger to pull with advertising. But too often in today’s data-driven marketing funnel, humor isn’t measured, therefore humor has gone away. This is, actually, a good thing for any marketer willing to step away from the data for just a moment and create something that makes people laugh. Because things that make people laugh also make people click.
In 2023 humor is starting to make a comeback too. At the Cannes 2023 Awards, 52% of Film category winners were intentionally funny – up 43% from 2022. The category’s Grand Prix was awarded to Apple’s ‘RIP, Leon,’ a cheeky spot about pet sitting gone awry. This tells us that clients are accepting of and hopefully asking for more funny in their campaigns because they know it works and we’ve gotten ourselves way too sucked into the data drip.
Anyway, hope that helps, Marty. Something to keep in mind tonight when you're watching The Voice and that floor cleaner commercial comes on that you love so much.