Fun for fun’s sake

Put simply, humour works. Especially when it comes to broad reaching brand campaigns. Marketers of everything from electronics to fast-food to packaged goods know it. And consumers respond to it. According to research from Oracle, 90% of consumers say they’re more likely to remember a funny ad and 72% would select a humorous brand over the competition. And it delivers an 11-point increase on Kantar’s distinctiveness measurement.  

But between a preponderance of serious purpose-driven marketing and a half decade (or more) of geo-political strife and pandemic, there hadn’t been much love for laughter. In fact, our ad doldrums started well before then. Research from Kantar found that humour in advertising had been dropping fairly consistently since 2002, with major dips seen around the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The good news is that humour is making a comeback. Last year, over half the Film Lions winners (52%) were intentionally funny – a Film Grand Prix went to Apple’s “RIP, Leon”, a darkly comic tale of a lizard and his petsitter. In 2022, just one in every 10 Cannes Lions Grand Prix and Gold winners employed humour.  

On top of that, this year, the Cannes Lions organisers introduced a humour category to the Cultural & Context sections that sit across the Lions. This trend towards humour in advertising, highlighted by Cannes Lions' recognition, is sparking creative campaigns worldwide, such as Coca-Cola Co’s Sprite initiative in China. The brand had a little fun with a cultural trend. Riffing off the prestige of 1982 Chateau Lafite Rothschild – a pop-culture touch stone across decades of movies that also happened to be incredibly expensive – Chinese social-media users had started jokingly referring to something more affordable to help them celebrate milestones: 1982 Sprite. Unfortunately, there were no vintage bottles of Sprite. But the EssenceMediacom client saw an opportunity. It officially launched 1982 Sprite in special packaging, starting with a live-stream auction for the first bottle. It opened Sprite Chateaux in locations across China so that soda connoisseurs could enjoy an immersive experience.