Humour - Making Advertising Enjoyable

During my time in Ireland, I noticed a lot of humorous advertisements in magazines, commercials, and on the radio. I found a very common link between Irish advertising and American advertising in the sense that humor is a very successful way to get the consumer's attention. In the United States, we see a lot of humor in beer commercials and other high profile companies, especially during the Super Bowl. It's almost as if there is a competition as to who has the better commercial. Here's a link to one of last year's examples (one of my favorites).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0

In this commercial you can see the humor in the little kid being surprised by the trick that the father is secretly playing on him. It's enjoyable and allows the viewer to remember it, and in doing so, hopefully the brand too.

In Ireland, there were similar commercials that do the same thing. Here is an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3cL8GGu0EU

In this ad, you are to be thinking the group is cheering for the soccer team, but the surprise shows that it's just the TV installation man. Just like the US ad, the humor in this one makes the audience remember the commercial, and even the product it is advertising.

Many advertisements use humor, not just in the US and Ireland, for this very reason. It is effective! Also, with low UAI cultures, there is less need for detail or resources to show how good the product is, a simple advertisement mentioning the name and associating it with some quality humor does just as well in promoting the product. In my opinion, I saw far more humor while in Ireland. I don't know if it is because the Irish accent in general makes everything funnier to me, I don't know why, or if it's because their culture has value and needs in humor. In Ireland's history, there was a lot of economic troubles and civil unrest. People worked extremely hard. For this reason humor may indeed have found its way into the culture to lighten the hardships they faced. It wasn't just in advertisements where I saw humor either. There were so many characters I met along the way who carried a humorous tone. When a culture values such things, they are apparent in many aspects of their life, advertising being one example.