Spending 7 million dollars for a 30-second ad – you’ll probably never have to do that, BUT Super Bowl advertisers did. Most of the ads were funny because humor sells, so learn from what they did and see if you can apply it to your business. Here’s my Marketing Tips from the Super Bowl Ads:
1. Beyonce –
we all know she can break the Internet when she drops a song, so Verizon took advantage of that and made a great (and funny) analogy with her trying to break Verizon. What major event (like breaking the internet) can you associate with your product or service? Then show how your product or service can stand up to it. Analogies are fast ways to add in some humor.
2. Christopher Walken –
is one of the most imitated celebrities in the world – trust me, I worked at comedy clubs and saw hundreds of up-and-coming comics try to mimic him as if no one had ever done it before! BMW wants you to buy their car, not an imitation, so they had people trying to imitate Christopher Walken and doing it badly. They made their point in a funny way about how imitations are NOT as good as the real deal. What do you NOT want people to do with your product? Show people why they should not do it.
3. After quarantine,
people tended to forget about using Uber Eats, so their funny take on remembering to order from them included celebrities. Jennifer Aniston started off saying that in order to remember something, you have to forget something else to “make room” for the new info. Does your company or product have a feature that people forget? Make a list of how people remember things (singing it, rhymes, mnemonics, repetition, story-telling, flashcards, etc . . . ) and make a funny twist on that memory technique or make up a new, silly memory technique.
4. State Farm’s commercial
with Arnold Schwarzenegger mispronouncing the word “neighbor” in their slogan was funny. Of course, you have to be careful making fun of a mispronunciation, but is there a word in your product that people mess up or confuse or don’t understand? Get it to stand out by making up a funny definition or pronunciation of it. Using your industry’s celebrities or highly visible people to try to figure it out is a nice way to keep your product in front of people.
5. And one note of caution:
The Duncan donuts commercial got a lot of thumbs up – I believe it was a callback to last year’s commercial. BUT since I didn’t remember last year’s commercial, it wasn’t that great for me. If you want to do a callback (referring to something done in the past) or a reference, make sure it’s recognizable. At my event last week, where I talked about using humor, an attendee gave me a great example of when he ALMOST opened a speech with a reference to a movie. It was a movie he LOVED, but he found out no one else had either seen it or remembered much about it. When he asked me about the movie, I hadn’t seen it either. He ditched the reference and saved himself a lot of blank stares.
There are many simple ways to incorporate humor into your message that gets overlooked. Have some fun and give it a whirl! It won’t break the bank, but wouldn’t it be cool if your message broke the internet!
Check out my joke writing website for more ideas on, well joke writing
And other tips for comedy writing are in this blog, such as this post.