Advantages of Marketing Humor

According to studies, 94 percent of advertising professionals believe that humor

is an effective approach to grab attention. Furthermore, 55 percent of advertising
research executives agrees that humor is more effective than non-humor in attracting
attention. (Madden and Weinberger 1984). While advertising executives' personal
opinions should not be equated with rigorous hypothesis testing, they do reflect a
knowledge foundation based on years of day-to-day experience with proprietary
research data. And, in the case of attention, the existing scientific research appears to
back up these practitioner perspectives. In studies of actual magazine ads (Madden and
Weinberger 1982), television ads (Stewart and Furse 1986), and radio ads (Weinberger
and Campbell 1991) in standard industry ad testing situations, it has been discovered
that humor has a beneficial influence on attentiveness. In the laboratory, this attention
impact has also been proven. The researchers did a comprehensive examination of the
impacts of attention in the advertising arena. On four attention metrics, Speck (1987)
compared humorous commercials to non-humorous controls: initial attention, sustained
attention, projected attention, and overall attention. On each of the attention
measurements, he discovered that humorous commercials outperformed non-
humorous ones.

Humor's power to draw attention has also been shown in research studies. (Powell and
Andresen 1985; Zillmann et al. 1980). Bryant and Zillmann (1989) conclude from a study
of the education literature that humor has a beneficial impact on attention; nevertheless,
they caution that "unqualified direct evidence for the effects of utilizing comedy in non-
mediated classroom teaching is still lacking" (p. 59). Bryant and Zillmann's cautious
attitude is applicable for all humor-attention research. While the findings appear to
show that comedy has a beneficial effect on attention, and the previous twenty years of
study mainly supports the conclusion reached by Stemthal and Craig (1973), future
researchers should be mindful that not all humor is created equal. Unrelated humor
tends to be less successful than related humor, which is satire that is closely related to
the product or subject being marketed (Duncan 1979; Lull 1940; Madden 1982). In fact,
adjusting for the relatedness component confirms the findings of the experimental
research in advertising that humor has a favorable influence on attention. This suggests
that just inserting "manufactured" comedy into an ad is unlikely to have the same effect
on attention as using a fully integrated humor approach.

Reference:

Gulas, Charles & Weinberger, Marc. (1992). The Impact of Humor in Advertising:
A Review. Retrieved from:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256580598_The_Impact_of_Humor_in_Ad
vertising_A_Review