On The Lighter Side: The Role Of Humor On The Job

Nowadays, there are many ways to elicit an earful from media and advertising folks. You can ask them about Michael Eisner, Bonnie Fuller or a handful of other boldfaced names. You can ask about the continued threat of media consolidation and how it might impact their business. You can throw out the words "Bush Administration."

Or, if you don't feel like getting battered with hours of rhetoric, you can ask them for their picks for the funniest ad campaigns of all time - as MediaPost did as part of a recent survey by InsightExpress about the role of humor in today's ad business. While respondents and interviewees weren't always sure of the names of the specific campaigns (or, in some cases, which company's ad they were discussing, which is an entirely different story), their enthusiasm for the topic made it very clear why most of them were in the business. Below is a sampling of the responses.

"The Budweiser commercials now, the beer-war thing - they're funny because they make fun of advertising, phrases like 'king of beers,' without pushing the informational message too hard. I also love the Citibank identity-theft ads, because they point out a problem and make us aware of the possibilities in a very humorous way. Also, it works well mnemonically." (Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker and president/founder of The Cartoon Bank)

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"My current favorite is one of the Corona ads set on a beach. There's a repulsive, hairy guy nearby, so the woman's hand moves the bottle so that it blocks her view of him. That sets the scene and [reinforces] the brand image just about as well as you can." (Yvonne Tocquigny, president, Tocquigny Advertising, Interactive + Marketing)

"I taped everything in the 1980s, so now those tapes are treasures because of the commercials. Those old, local car dealership commercials - they fill my heart with joy. You get the psychedelic pre-digital effects, you get the streamers, the confetti, the roller skates. You also get a lot of people running through paper signs. To me, that's the apex of humor. I'm not sure if it was done straight or ironically, but either way they won." (Scott Cohn, creative director, Night Agency)

"The Budweiser Super Bowl commercial with the Clydesdales playing football. What a wonderful twist on an established brand icon." (Steve Sultanoff, psychologist and past president of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor)

"Whenever I speak, I bring up some of the great examples and see if the crowd remembers them. I'll say, 'Sorry, Charlie, only the best tuna get to be.' and they'll say 'StarKist!' I'll ask, 'What doesn't Mr. Whipple want you to squeeze?' and they'll say 'the Charmin!' That goes back around 30 years. To have that kind of staying power is amazing." (Bob Ross, author/speaker, www.corporatecomic.com)

"This is almost a trick question. I remember when I was a kid and just about everybody was running around saying 'I can't believe I ate the whole thing!' Great commercial - but Alka-Seltzer was going down the drain in sales no matter how much everybody liked it. The one I'm enjoying most right now is the Budweiser lizards and their response to the Miller presidential campaign. One of the lizards says something like 'apparently Miller isn't eligible to run for President because they're owned by South African brewers." That cracked me up. I thought, 'Give that person a raise.'" (Ian Crocket, president, Hunter Barth Advertising)

"Much as all real humor flows out of the truth, all good advertising humor flows out of something that's true about the product. You can't just graft a one-liner onto a toothpaste ad and expect it to work. As far as three or four all-time funny campaigns, the current Fed Ex work. Hal Riney's Henry Weinhard's campaign. 'This Is SportsCenter' on ESPN." (Robert Reiser, chief creative officer, Cossette Post and co-partner, Thinking Sports)

"Humorous ads that make us say 'isn't that the truth?' have the best chance of success in my opinion. The double-kiss ad for Italian pasta sauce - I love that ad. The babies sitting in water, then one baby farts and all we see are bubbles - this is an old one and I can't recall the exact product. The ad for throat lozenges where the golfer hits people with his ball and can't warn them because he is hoarse. After he takes Fisherman's Friend lozenge, he can yell 'Fore!'" (Mike Moore, author, "Light Up with Laughter" and "Humor in the Workplace")

"Taco Bell: that talking dog captured everyone's fancy. I felt they stopped the campaign too soon. Also, they did not take full advantage of the goodwill built up through the campaign. Wendy's 'Where's the Beef?': This campaign said out loud what most people were saying anyway. It in effect made fun of the industry itself. Energizer Batteries: the bunny that never stops running. Frequency was needed to get the brand established. They used the combination of a product feature/benefit coupled with a humorous memorable icon." (Elliott Black, president/founder, EMBA)

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