What’s your favorite commercial ever?
If you are anything like us, you probably thought of one that made you smile or laugh, like a commercial from Geico, Dollar Shave Club, or Progressive.
But why do we remember those specific commercials? You might say, “because it was funny”, but research actually shows that the reasoning goes much deeper. Let’s explore the numerous benefits of humorous content in promoting your brand or business.
Let’s start with what is known as the “Humor Effect”
The Humor Effect is a cognitive bias that forces you to remember humorous content better. When you look at this from a cognitive perspective, essentially the brain has to do more work in order to process a joke and therefore has a longer processing time.
As a result of the longer processing time, your brain forms stronger connections to the information being presented. This humorous content also creates stronger recall because of another connection it makes in your brain through emotional arousal while trying to make you laugh.
Interesting stuff. So how does this work from a commercial or brand video perspective?
According to the 1993 Journal of Marketing study, ‘humor is more likely to enhance recall, evaluation, and purchase intention when the humorous message coincides with ad objectives is well-integrated with those objectives and is viewed as appropriate for the product category. Under such circumstances, humorous advertising is more likely to secure audience attention, increase memorability, overcome sales resistance, and enhance message persuasiveness.’
That’s a lot of fancy words to say that humor, when tactfully used, has the ability to make people like you and feel more connected with you. This makes them more likely to remember your message and take action on your product or service.
Humorous video content also has several other benefits like allowing you to stand out from your competition, increasing the trust of your consumer, and reducing the negative emotions of your audience.
At Mac N’ Cheese Media we specialize in using humorous videos to help our clients achieve their marketing goals. Here’s an example of how we helped one of country music’s biggest acts, Toby Keith, promote his upcoming music video through a humorous promo ad.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/psTJuUZ5aVM?controls=0
Toby Keith’s team approached us with the idea of creating a memorable promotional video to help bring awareness to Toby’s “What’s Up Cuz” single that he was releasing. The hook of the single focused on the idea that Toby calls everyone his “Cuz” or cousin so we began discussing as a team how we could play off of that in a humorous way.
After conceptualizing different concepts and collaborating with their team, we landed on creating a humorous spoof of the infamous “Sham-Wow” infomercials and inserting a fake Toby Keith branded product utilizing a red solo cup that could “test” if you were Toby Keith’s cousin. The brand recognition and relatability of the red solo cup as the “test” and humourous spoof produced fantastic results.
Across both Facebook and YouTube, the promotional video garnered:
500,000+
Views
2,500+
Likes
200+
Comments
Ready to start making humorous videos for your business, but don’t know how or where to start. Here are a few tips to get you started…
- Start experimenting with simple ideas. Start by shooting them on a DSLR camera or cell phone and edit them on your phone or basic editing software like iMovie or Filmora
- See what type of feedback you get from your internal team and/or social media audience
- Utilize constructive feedback to create another video or refine the original
- Repeat this process until you find a style of humor and concept that resonates with your audience and aligns with your brand
- Create a series of videos with a similar style of content to maximize your audience’s attention and engagement with your brand
We’ll go into more detail in the future about how to create humorous videos and the best formats/platforms to utilize that content, but don’t be afraid to just get started – you may be surprised by the results.
