2. Brand funny is funny you can see
So much of advertising is about tapping into the conventional wisdom, and as a result, advertising imagery has become just as much a core element of our culture as is going to church on Easter Sunday, trick-or-treating on Halloween, or seeing an action flick on Fourth of July weekend.
In my view, visual humor is much more likely to work in digital environments than verbal humor -- although words definitely bring the point home once visuals have grabbed the eyeballs. Because online is a scanned medium, telegraphic imagery can offer the stopping power necessary to grab consumer attention. Words do matter, but the challenge of word-driven humor is that it is hard to "get" when scanned, and indeed hard for many people to "get" at all.
Slapstick and physical comedy are forms of visual humor that helped give TV its start, and making the joke visual has been a critical part of humor that works for brands online
Smirnoff: Tea Partay
How do you make a tea-flavored alcohol beverage relevant to young people? And do it without seeming like a company trying too hard to make tea relevant to the younger set? Smirnoff Raw Tea's P-Unit uses the refined, stuffy, irrelevant essence of the brand equity of "tea" to make the Raw Tea offering supremely relevant.
After seeing this image of the butt shot in white chinos, straight out of The Talbots (a move I call the Lil' Kim-berly), what man could resist sending this vid to all 297 of his Bebo friends?
Carlton Draught: Flashbeer
Here the visual humor is using the iconic imagery of the "tairedest" American movie and the physical consequences of drinking lots of tasty Australian beer. It's all leveraged to connect with users, demonstrate the greatness of Carlton, and show how much the brand should mean to you.
Durex: 100 Million Reasons
If asked to think of condom imagery, many people would conjure steamy silhouettes on condom packages or something extremely explicit. The problem is, sexuality is so prevalent online that it would be challenging to find prurient imagery to support a brand. Add to that the different senses of what men versus women find "hot," and it's easy to see why a condom brand would turn to humor to capture and hold attention.
This video of a man and his "boys" has the sort of stopping power that keeps people talking about it years after it hit the Diggosphere. I remember getting a link to this from about a dozen people -- men and women both.
Yes, one could certainly say that it doesn't say a whole heck of a lot about what makes Durex different, but sometimes all we have is imagery to differentiate us. And seriously, what are they going to talk about? Ribs for her pleasure?
