Whatever happened to funny ads?
Have clients stopped buying them or are agencies not writing them?
They used to dominate the ad breaks.
Humour was the first tool you reached for after being handed a brief.
Why? Well, as that Poppins women says ‘A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down’.
Actually…did they dominate ad breaks?
Maybe I’ve slipped on my rose-tinted specs again?
I reach for an old D&AD Annual.
Randomly, I pick up 1991’s.
34 tv and cinema ads featured; 28 were funny.
Of the 28, the most awarded were for Barclaycard and Red Rock Cider.
They feel slightly odd today.
They aren’t ‘advertising funny’, they’re actually funny.
In a way that I can’t imagine them popping up between Bake Off?
I don’t know whether it’s because they don’t take the product very seriously? Some even make fun of it. (Imagine; making fun of the very people who pay the bills?)
Or maybe getting bigger laughs than the programmes that surround you feels like bad form?
Like you have aspirations above your station.
I decided to do a bit of rudimentary desk research, discovering that humour is still surprisingly popular.
The public love it, apparently.
Much preferring it to being lectured to or bullshitted.
So why the lack of funny ads?
Even ad testing companies are urging us to produce more.
(Yes System 1, I’m talking about you.)
In an effort to better understand this humour thing, I went straight to the Chairman of the Board, the Grand Fromage, the Capo di Tutti Frutti – John Lloyd.
Not only did he shoot both the campaigns above, he’d spent two decades beforehand producing the funniest stuff on tv, including Not The Nine O’clock News, Blackadder and Spitting Image.
We had a lovely chat, hope you enjoy it.
Phileas Fogg – BBH.
Molsen – HHCL.
Sony – BBH.
Hamlet – CDP.
Henri Wintermans – Lowe Howard-Spink.
Holsten Pils – GGT.
Allied Dunbar – BBH.
Barclaycard – BMP/DDB
Benelin JWT.
Boddingtons – BBH.
Red Rock Cider – GGT.
New York Lotto –
Castlemaine – Saatchi & Saatchi.
Magnavox – Amiratti & Puris.
Dime Bar – Y&R.
Lucky Strike – Dorlands.
Nintendo –
Tetley Bitter – Saatchi & Saatchi.
British Gas – BMP/DDB.
Worthington Best Bitter – WCRS.
Norwich Union – Saatchi & Saatchi.
Kit Kat – JWT.
Kellogs – JWT.
Alliance & Leicester – BMP/DDB.
Abbey National – Euro/RSCG.
McCain – BMB.
MORE JL.
I still talk about ‘floating on the bouillabaisse of life” and expect people to know what I’m on about. Lovely stuff as ever – thanks Dave!
Thanks Graham,
Yep love that line, it’s John voicing it, in fact the whole ad stands up incredibly well.
Dx
Fascinating podcast, but I must have a comment on the history of the Barclaycard campaign:
‘Recollections may vary’ as Her late Majesty put it…. I’m sure John isn’t making it up, though his version sounds so different from mine. I have no memory of Michael Palin in this, but what I suspect now is that Jon Matthews was working with John Lloyd on this idea long before it made it on to the agency radar. Certainly the pitch campaign and the six months wasted trying to make it work were as I describe in the book, and certainly the animatic I tested featured an unmistakable Rowan Atkinson [doing bad Whicker impersonations]. It may even still exist in the HAT archive which has a lot of BMP stuff. What was said to whom exactly and in what order I wasn’t party to, though it must have been very clever and possibly slightly devious in order to rescue what had become a very fraught situation. Perhaps you should do another podcast and ask Jon Matthews, and perhaps Penny Bagnall-Smith (then Penny Reid) who was the account director. I should be fascinated to hear what they remember.